NEW YORK - It's crowded. It's hot. You have to climb hundreds of steps to get there. And throngs of people can't wait to visit.

Unfortunately, many will have to. Tickets sold out fast for the July 4 reopening of the Statue of Liberty's crown, which has been closed since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Aaron Weisinger, 26, of Walnut Creek, Calif., was one of the lucky ones. He will be part of the first group of tourists in years to climb the 354 steps, 146 of them up a narrow spiral staircase, to stand atop the statue's head and peer from under the spikes of her crown.

"The statue is very powerful. It symbolizes liberty and freedom," said Weisinger, whose great-grandparents met Lady Liberty's gaze as they passed through Ellis Island from Eastern Europe.

Reasons vary why the crown has been closed for so long, and there are questions about the role that terrorism played in that.

After terrorists leveled the World Trade Center just across New York Harbor, the statue was closed to visitors until 2004, when its base, pedestal, and outdoor observation deck reopened.

In May, the Obama administration announced that the crown would once again welcome visitors, albeit cautiously. Starting Saturday, 30 people an hour will be allowed into the crown, and they will be brought up in groups of 10, guided by park rangers.

New handrails have been installed to help with the climb. Bags are not allowed. Only cameras and cell phones are acceptable.

The National Park Service says the crown remained closed since Sept. 11 because the narrow, double-helix staircases could not be safely evacuated in an emergency and did not meet fire and building codes. Tourists often suffered heat exhaustion, shortness of breath, panic attacks, claustrophobia, and fear of heights, spokesman Darren Boch said.

Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (D., N.Y.) has pushed for years for the crown to be reopened, once calling the decision to close it off "a partial victory for terrorists." For it to be off-limits for so long was an embarrassment, he said.

"I've always said this was as much a failure of creativity as it was a failure of courage," Weiner said. "I just think they couldn't figure out basic things like limiting the number of people, for example, or limiting whether they can carry a bag with them."

Boch insisted that fear of an attack was not the primary reason the crown stayed closed. The statue's designer, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, never intended for visitors to ascend to the crown, he said.

"We had actually looked at closing the crown even before 9/11, for the safety of visitors and protection of the resource itself," Boch said.

The $15 tickets to the crown went on sale June 13, and tickets for this coming weekend sold out within hours. Four of those tickets went to Weisinger, whose girlfriend's parents are also immigrants.

"Our parents and great-grandparents put in so much work for us to be able to live the lives that we do," he said.

So far, about 14,500 tickets to the crown have been sold, most for visits through the end of August. Tickets now on sale are for visits in the fall and beyond.

Read more about visiting

the Statue of Liberty via http://go.philly.com/liberty