The Statue of Liberty opened to the public Tuesday for the first time since the September 11 attacks in 2001, but the monument's crown remained closed to hordes of tourists who grabbed the first boats out.
Liberty Island was closed on the day of the attacks for security reasons. It reopened in December of that year, but access was barred to the statue itself - until now.
Tuesday's re-opening ceremony, presided over by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, went ahead despite a fresh alert Wednesday over a possible terrorist attack on financial institutions in Manhattan, New Jersey and Washington.
Norton said the decision to keep the statue's crown closed to the public had been a pragmatic but difficult one. "We had to make a number of choices," Norton told AFP.
"We wanted to have the most number of people enjoy the statue and, after carefully weighing all the options, we decided an observation area would be the best approach," she said.
The higher reaches of the statue - the crown requires a climb of 354 steps, or some 22 storeys - cannot cope with large numbers of tourists and the access route also fails certain safety standards.
The compromise decided by the National Parks Service was to provide an observation deck, with a panoramic view, in Lady Liberty's pedestal some 150 feet above the ground.
"It's disappointing, but I can understand it," said Brenda Pickett from Kansas, one of thousands of tourists who crammed onto the first two boats leaving Manhattan for the short trip to the island. "Things are starting to go forward, even if we are remembering the past," Pickett said of the re-opening.
Tom Mom, a visitor from the Netherlands, said the significance of the statue resonated beyond the United States. The closure of the statue was only the second since it was installed in 1886, and the first in 85 years. In 1916, Lady Liberty's arm was damaged and its structure jeopardised when German saboteurs blew up a weapons dump near the banks of the nearby state of New Jersey.