"I feel like I was just born today," said Andrea Balfour, 38, as she prepared to go up to the crown with her daughter, Mona. Mona won an essay contest sponsored by the New York Daily News to get to go up to crown Saturday — her 13th birthday.
The visit was the Staten Island pair's "biggest dream," said Balfour, who takes the Staten Island ferry daily to go to work. "I pass it every day and we just wave to it or take pictures. Now we actually get to go inside."
Marking the historic date, seven members of the U.S. armed forces were sworn in as citizens Saturday at the statue's base.
"It's the very diversity of this country that has made us strong," Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said.
The statue, 305 feet tall to the tip of its raised torch, was designed to mark the 1876 centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It faces the entrance to New York Harbor, welcoming the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," in the words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on a bronze plaque inside the statue.
The torch has been closed since it was damaged by a saboteur's bomb in 1916.
Visitors are now screened before boarding ferries and again before they can visit the museum in the base or climb to the top of the pedestal.
Jennifer Stewart won a Statue of Liberty lookalike contest to join the first group of visitors headed to the crown. The Brooklyn Heights resident, who has imitated the statue for 23 years, arrived in full costume and green makeup.
"Being able to perceive the world through her eyes, from Liberty's crown — I just feel it's so important to maintain the opportunity to literally be a part of liberty," she said.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
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