Every year, millions of people visit the Statue of Liberty, and a lucky, pre-booked fraction climb the 162 steps into her crown. What nobody gets to do — what nobody has done as a member of the public for 110 years — is continue upward, through the raised right arm, up the narrow 40-foot ladder into the torch.

The torch balcony, the statue’s actual summit, has been closed since 1916. Not for safety inspections, not for renovation. It is closed because of an act of war on American soil — one that most Americans have never heard of, carried out more than a year before the United States entered the First World War.

Two a.m., July 30, 1916

The target was Black Tom, a mile-long promontory and rail terminal jutting into New York Harbor from Jersey City, directly behind the Statue of Liberty. In 1916, neutral America was selling munitions to Britain and France by the shipload, and Black Tom was the funnel: on the night in question, its warehouses, rail cars and barges held roughly two million pounds of ammunition and explosives, waiting for transit to the Allied lines.

Imperial Germany, unable to stop the trade diplomatically, had built a sabotage network inside the United States to burn it instead. Shortly after two in the morning on July 30, 1916, small fires appeared on the terminal — set, as decades of investigation would establish, by German agents — and at 2:08 the depot went up in one of the largest man-made explosions the world had yet seen.

The blast has been estimated at the equivalent of a magnitude-5-class earthquake. It was felt as far away as Philadelphia and Maryland. Thousands of windows shattered across lower Manhattan and Jersey City; shrapnel and debris rained across the harbor; immigrants detained on Ellis Island had to be evacuated as fragments struck the buildings. The clock on the Jersey Journal building stopped at 2:12, holding the time of the explosion for decades. Remarkably, the confirmed death toll was small — a handful of people, including a railroad guard and an infant blown from his crib — a mercy owed entirely to the hour.

The statue takes shrapnel

The Statue of Liberty stood barely half a mile from the blast, facing it. The explosion drove chunks of steel into the statue and its island, peppering the copper skin; the damage, concentrated in the raised torch arm, was assessed at around $100,000 — well over $2 million today.

The arm had always been the statue’s engineering soft spot; its internal structure had been assembled slightly out of alignment in 1886, and officials had long eyed the torch climb nervously. The shrapnel settled the question. The ladder to the torch was closed to the public that year, and the closure simply never ended — through the statue’s 1938 refurbishment, through the 1980s centennial restoration, through every reopening of the crown, including the years-long closures after 9/11 and during later renovations. The crown always came back. The torch never did.

There is a wrinkle even in what “the torch” now means. The battered original — its flame rebuilt with glass panes in a 1916 repair by Gutzon Borglum, the future Mount Rushmore sculptor, which mostly succeeded in letting rain in — was finally taken down during the 1984–86 restoration and replaced with a new copper flame gilded in gold leaf. The 1886 original sits at ground level in the Statue of Liberty Museum, where visitors can finally stand next to the balcony their great-great-grandparents could climb into. The only people who go up the new torch’s ladder are National Park Service staff, to service the floodlights; a webcam on the balcony shows everyone else the view.

Germany pays, eventually

The other long tail of Black Tom was legal. Proving state-directed sabotage took decades of investigation through the German-American Mixed Claims Commission, tangled in denials, forged evidence and the small complication of a second World War. Germany was formally found responsible in 1939; a settlement of $50 million was agreed in 1953, and the final installments weren’t paid until 1979 — sixty-three years after the fires were lit. Black Tom itself was absorbed into landfill and is now a corner of Liberty State Park, marked by a modest plaque and a circle of flags that most picnickers walk past.

Which leaves the statue herself as the event’s most visible monument. The Black Tom explosion is a genuine historical hinge — it pushed Congress toward espionage legislation and helped shape the American intelligence apparatus — but its plainest legacy is subtractive: a missing experience. The most famous statue on Earth has an observation deck that has now been closed for 110 years and counting, sealed by an attack that predates the country’s entry into the war it belonged to. Every photograph of Liberty holding her torch above the harbor includes, unlabeled, the war damage: not a mark on the copper, but the emptiness of the balcony — a room shut in 1916 by men working for the Kaiser, and never reopened.