Statue City Cruises has held the National Park Service's ferry concession since 2007 and is the only carrier authorized to land passengers on Liberty and Ellis Islands.
Tickets sell out during peak season and every passenger passes through airport-style security screening with strict bag-size limits before boarding at Battery Park or Liberty State Park.
Both islands are federal property, and the only public boat that lands on them runs under a National Park Service concession. Statue City Cruises has held that concession since 2007, taking over from Circle Line Downtown, which had carried visitors out since 1953; the Park Service awarded a further ten-year contract beginning in March 2024. Boats leave from Castle Clinton in the Battery and from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, and one ticket covers both stops, so you can stay as long as you like on either island and pick up a later boat.
Liberty Island is smaller than photographs suggest. Bartholdi's copper figure, dedicated in 1886 over an iron armature engineered by Gustave Eiffel, stands on Richard Morris Hunt's granite pedestal inside the star-shaped walls of Fort Wood. Grounds access comes with the ferry; the pedestal and the crown are separate timed tickets, and the crown allocation is small enough that it goes months ahead. The museum that opened on the island in 2019 holds the original torch, removed during the 1980s restoration and replaced with a new one.
Ellis Island is the half most visitors underrate. The main building reopened as a museum in 1990 after a long restoration, and the Registry Room upstairs, two hundred feet long under a vaulted ceiling more than fifty feet high, is where roughly twelve million arrivals were inspected between 1892 and 1954. The derelict hospital complex on the island's south side opens only on a separate hard hat tour run by the nonprofit Save Ellis Island.
Be realistic about the day. Every passenger is screened like an airline passenger before boarding, bags are restricted, and the queues are the longest part of the trip; half a day is a fair budget. The boat is transport, not a guided tour. If all you want is the statue in a photograph and a skyline behind it, the Staten Island Ferry crosses the same bay free of charge.
Battery Park, New York, NY 10004 · Official site ↗
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture of a robed and crowned woman on Liberty Island, part of New York City, in New York Harbor. The copper-clad statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and its metal framework built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
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