How do you visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island?

The short answer

Take the ferry from the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. It is the only way onto Liberty Island and Ellis Island, and it is run by a single company, Statue City Cruises, which the National Park Service names as the only authorized seller of tickets for the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island. Buy your ticket from it, online, before the day you go. Every ticket includes both islands and both museums; if you want to go inside the statue, to the top of the pedestal or up to the crown, you need a special ticket, and those sell out well in advance.

Allow most of a day. The ferry makes a loop from Manhattan to Liberty Island, on to Ellis Island and back, and to see both properly you need to start early.

The three tickets

There are three kinds of ticket, and choosing the right one is the most important decision of the visit.

General admission is the most widely available ticket. It takes you to both islands and admits you to the Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island and the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, but not inside the statue or its pedestal. You can walk all around the statue on the grounds of the island, and for many visitors that is enough. When the other tickets are sold out, it is the only ticket left.

A pedestal ticket adds access up to the observation balcony at the top of the pedestal, which Richard Morris Hunt designed of granite, and which is roughly half the height of the whole monument. From its balcony you look out over the harbor and straight up at the statue above you. Pedestal tickets are limited and sold online only.

A crown ticket takes you all the way up, inside the statue to the crown. It is the most limited of the three, sold online only, and it must be bought well in advance; for the busiest seasons, buy it as soon as your dates are fixed.

Climbing to the crown

The climb is the reason so few people make it. There is no elevator to the crown. From the feet of the statue you climb at least 162 steps on a narrow double spiral staircase, and the Park Service compares the walk from the ground floor to the crown with climbing the stairs of a twenty-story building. It is confined, and anyone with a fear of tight spaces should think twice.

The reward is the chance to see the inside of the statue. As you climb, Gustave Eiffel's iron framework, which holds up the copper skin, is fully visible around you, and from the crown's small windows you get tightly framed views of the harbor, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Along the way the pedestal's observation levels open onto wider views.

Security and the ferry

Before you board, everyone passes through airport-style security, at the Battery in Manhattan or at Liberty State Park on the New Jersey side. The time printed on your ferry ticket is not the time the boat leaves: it is the time to join the line for the security screening. At busy times, including summer, weekends and holidays, the wait can be an hour or more, so arrive on time and travel light.

The ferry from the Battery calls first at Liberty Island and then at Ellis Island before returning to Manhattan. You can get off at each island, stay as long as you like, and catch a later boat on to the next stop. The Park Service recommends an early ferry if you want to see both islands in one day, and it is good advice: the lines are shortest early, and Ellis Island deserves time.

On Liberty Island

The statue, dedicated in 1886, is Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's copper figure of Liberty Enlightening the World, a gift from the people of France. Start at the Statue of Liberty Museum, a building of 26,000 square feet opened in 2019, which tells the story of how the statue was conceived and built. Its most moving exhibit is the statue's original torch, which Liberty carried from 1886 until 1984, when it was replaced during the restoration of the 1980s.

Then walk the island's perimeter for the classic views of the statue from every side, with Lower Manhattan across the water. Park rangers lead free guided tours of the grounds throughout the day, starting at the flagpole and lasting about thirty-five minutes, and an audio tour, included with the ferry ticket, covers the grounds, the museum and the framework seen from the pedestal. It is available in twelve languages, with versions for children and for visitors who are blind or have low vision, and there are American Sign Language tours as well.

On Ellis Island

Ellis Island was the country's busiest immigration station. From 1892 to 1954 about twelve million immigrants arriving at the port of New York passed through its halls, and by one estimate two-fifths of Americans may be descended from them. The great main building is now the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, included in every ferry ticket.

Its heart is the Registry Room on the second floor, where new arrivals waited in lines to be inspected; some one percent were sent back, and its exhibits follow immigrants from the ships through the medical and primary inspections to the ferries that carried them on to Manhattan and New Jersey. Rangers lead tours here too, and the audio tour continues on this island. The Registry Room alone is two hundred feet long, under a ceiling fifty-six feet high, and it is worth standing in it for a few minutes and imagining it full.

If you cannot get tickets

If the ferry is sold out, or you have only a short time, there is a free alternative. The Staten Island Ferry, which has been fare-free since 1997, leaves the Whitehall Terminal next to the Battery and crosses the harbor past the Statue of Liberty in about twenty-five minutes. It does not stop at Liberty Island, but it passes close enough for a good photograph, and the view back to Lower Manhattan is one of the finest in the city.

Either way, beware of anyone selling Statue tickets or tours on the street around the Battery: only Statue City Cruises lands visitors on the islands. Booking ahead lists the other things in the city that sell out.