“New York is really a southern city compared to New England”, says Neo. Which I as a Southerner dispute with vigor.
NYC is as much Yankeetown as is Boston, though the former is apparently fuller of black and brown “migrants”.

Sorry Cicero, but Neo is absolutely correct here. You don’t see many votes to secede and join the Confederacy (or symbolic wearing of the Confed Flag) in New England, While it has become a lot more “Yankee” and tied to “New England” in recent decades, it definitely was not always like that. It was formed at about the middle point between the South and New England by the Dutch and so absorbed a bunch of different influences from them, which is one reason why it’s generally been the midpoint between them in our politics, from being “Officially Patriot aligned but with heavy Royalist Sentiment” in 1775-6 (to being the inverse during the British occupation), to having avowedly pro-slavery and pro-Southern political dominance in Tammany Hall (with a particular note being to Fernando Wood’s abortive attempt to secede from the US in 20 or so years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, and to Tammany’s heavy ties to the “Solid South”.

Things really changed from what I can tell in the 1960s and especially 1970s with Tammany’s downfall, the South shifting Republican, and so forth. And even then it’s worth noting that NYC still has heavy ties to a lot of the major Leftist strongholds in the South like Atlanta.

The idea that it was as Yankee as Boston has more to do with Boston becoming a lot more like the NYC under the reign of Curley and his successors, as well as the political sea changes severing the South from the Dems and breaking Tammany’s domestic stranglehold (albeit it looks like they were largely replaced by a different Dem political machine).

I knew most of the story about the statue. My first thought watching the video was: Yes, funding was a problem before the federal income tax. That was when the federal government was fiscally a very small portion of a giant private and series of state’s economies. Now the feds eat a large piece of everything they have access to, which is almost everything. What a mistake.

Remember Sen. Dircksen’s quote? “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.” Obama got nearly a trillion allocated for “shovel ready jobs,” and although they “only” spent a little over $0.5T, IIRC; in the wake of its fiasco, he used it as a laugh line. Imagine that. Complacency.

The color of clean copper is a lovely reddish yellow or gold. So different than the oxidized color. It must have looked really cool in those first several years.

When I was a pre-teen or teen, I walked up inside the statue, though the arm was closed off. And along the Promenade probably around 1980, give or take a couple years.

That’s the problem. Things that should bother people don’t.

“We used to have sensible immigration policy, but then someone built this damn statue.”
The problem is not the statue, but the poem attached to the pedestal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus

Even so, the people lauded by Lazarus are not exactly the same as the ones now being “sent” to us by some not-so-ancient lands.