Commemorative Coins of the United States
Q. David Bowers
1986 Statue of Liberty Silver Dollars
(Ellis Island Silver Dollars)
Honoring the Statue of Liberty
The 1986 Statue of Liberty silver dollars, also known as Ellis Island silver dollars, were made possible by legislation enacted into law on July 9, 1985, which provided for the coinage of up to 10 million silver coins of the dollar denomination. Refer to the description under the earlier listing of 1986 Statue of Liberty half dollars for additional information.
The Design
The design of John Mercanti, engraver at the Philadelphia Mint, was chosen from among other staff entries for the silver dollar. Matthew Peloso, also of the Engraving Department of the Mint, worked on certain lettering on the reverse utilizing Mercanti's concept.
The obverse depicted the Statue of Liberty in the foreground, with the main building at Ellis Island in the distance to the left, with the inscription ELLIS / ISLAND / GATEWAY TO / AMERICA above. Mint publicity described the design as follows: "The Statue of Liberty silver dollar was created from the artist's feeling of majesty derived from the frontal view of the Statue."
The reverse illustrated a hand holding a torch, taken from the Statue of Liberty, and an excerpt in four lines from Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus: GIVE ME YOUR TIRED / YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED / MASSES YEARNING / TO BREATHE FREE.
John Mercanti's Personal Sense of History
William T. Gibbs of Coin World interviewed the artist: ("Doing Something Like This Gave Me a Chance to Thank Everybody," by William T. Gibbs. Coin World, April 16, 1986, p. 58.) "John Mercanti's design for the 1986 Ellis Island silver dollar makes a more personal statement than made by most commemorative coinage. It's his way of thanking his grandparents and parents for all of the sacrifices they made for him. Mercanti's grandparents on both his mother's and father's sides of the family passed through Ellis Island during the 1920s as immigrants from Sicily. Some of the Ellis Island facilities the 43-year-old Mercanti's family passed through 60 years ago appear on the coin, to the right of the full-length Statue of Liberty, beneath her upraised arm. The dollar is the only one of the three commemorative coins to show the entire Statue from the front, a circumstance made possible by the size of the dollar, at 38.1 millimeters the largest in the series.
"'I wanted to use the size of the dollar to show the full frontal portrait of the Statue,' Mercanti said. 'I wanted to depict the Statue in all its majesty, looking directly at it. And that was hard because I had no photo reference that I could really draw on. So I had to do a lot of digging at the library, and I finally came up with a very obscure photograph of a front view of the Statue. [With] that, coupled with a lot of my reference material, I was able to get the drawing that I wanted.'
"Mercanti is happy with his design, even though it depicts less than his original sketch submitted to Mint Director Donna Pope. 'I had originally envisioned portraying 'Liberty leading a group of immigrants off of Ellis Island into the United States,' Mercanti said. 'I had a family behind her the same size [as the Statue]. But that was modified and changed to show just the Statue .... She's majestic and large, but I brought her down to our level and showed her walking, leading these people off the island. But that didn't go, so we went with this one.'
"Mercanti is pleased with the changes made. 'I think they [officials in Washington] wanted one modification. They accepted my submission with the family, then they asked me to make another modification-I had a ship in there-but it did become kind of crowded. It did become too busy. Simplicity is the name of the game in this field.'
"So Mercanti took the family off the coin, leaving the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The representative of the Ellis Island facilities 'was in there initially,' he said. He removed it because 'It becomes a balancing problem. You have so many things that go on the coin. You have LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, the date. All these things have to be balanced. In order to balance it, I had to use as much as I had there; if I showed any more of the building, I would have reduced the size of the building, which would have made it a lot smaller behind Liberty, and I didn't want that. I wanted to keep it a good perspective. I wanted to show as much of the building as possible. It's not actually the view you see. It's more of an allegorical interpretation. It's not like Mr. Steever's half dollar that shows exactly that portion of the bay there where the Statue is .... My interpretation is more allegorical.'
"Like the other sculptor-engravers on the Philadelphia Mint staff, Mercanti did not wait for final approval of the Statue of Liberty legislation to begin work. 'I'd been formulating ideas for this for many months, he said. 'When we get an inkling something is coming down the pike, that's when I begin forming ideas. I begin a sketch; we all do, we begin to put down little sketches on paper. This is how the creative process develops, with just an idea.' With official approval, 'then we can really delve into it.'