The Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty

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The Statue of Liberty is a splendid statue, which stands on a small Bedloe's Island at the entrance to New York harbour. Its top reaches 305 feet (nearly 100 metres) above the water level.

The Statue of Liberty is the work of the well-known 19th-century French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi. The Statue is made from copper sheets and it is hollow inside. 225 tons of metal were used for its construction. Inside there is a circular stairway from the base to the crown. There is also a lift in it.

The figure shows a young woman freeing herself from shackles. She holds a torch in her right hand above her head, and in her left hand is a tablet with the date "July 4th, 1776" on it, which symbolizes the Declaration of In-dependence. The torchlights up at night, the Statue stands on the east side of Manhattan Island.

The Statue of Liberty was built on funds collected in France and symbolizes the friendship of the United States and France of those days. The statue, presented to the United States of America in 1884, became national monument in 1924.

On a tablet (besides the date) are inscribed the last five lines of a sonnet, “The New Colossus”, by Emma Lazarus, a popular American poet, herself an immigrant:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, and tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

 

New York is known all over the world as the city of skyscrapers. And really, there are a lot of huge buildings here. The most famous of them is the Empire State Building ("Empire State" is the nickname of New York), which was thought as "the eighth wonder of the world".

The Empire State Building was opened on May 1, 1931. Then it had 102 floors and was 318 metres high. Twenty years later a TV antenna was built on its roof, and the building grew 68 metres higher. Now its height is 449 metres.

The Empire State Building stands in the centre of New York, on Manhattan, and presents inspiring views around the horizon, night or day, in wet weather or dry, to visitors from all over the world. It houses 25,000 tenants. There two observation platforms: one - on the 86th and the other on the 102 floors. From its dizzy height one looks over the business area of Broadway and Wall Street. In the north one can see Central Park, the greatest park of New York.

On the walls of a huge hall of the Empire State Building (30 metres long and 3 floors high) you can see the pictures of all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Great Pyramid, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the temple of Diana, the Tomb of King Mausolus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. And just opposite there is a picture of a skyscraper in the rays of the rising sun.

Every year competitions in stair-racing are held inside the Empire State Building. The participants must overcome 1860 stairs to reach the observation platform on the 102nd floor.

Certainly, you can reach the top of the building using one of the high-speed lifts, which carry 10,000 people an hour.

The Empire State Building remained the world's tallest until the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were opened in 1972. The Trade Centre's triumph was short. A new skyscraper was built two years later. In 1974, the 110-storeyed Search Tower was completed in Chicago. It was 1,454 feet high.