“So, in just eight short weeks, thousands of peripatetic children and
Vertiginous view
perspiring parents and elderly aunts from Omaha who drew the short straw on their trip to New York will once again be able to work their way up the low-railed and vertiginous, not-so-slightly claustrophobic, 12-story-high stairway to her crown.”
Michael Powell, NYT, To Hardy, Lady Liberty’s Crown Beckons Anew, 5/9/09
ver·tig·i·nous (v
r-t
j
-ns)
adj.
_
AND the story even gets in the parenthetical reporter’s first-person perspective, also worthy of kudos:
“(This correspondent recalls the precise moment his mother ended a July ascent: She gazed at a young son and two daughters expertly torturing one another and at a line that stretched endlessly up; that way, she knew, lay madness).”
Inverted Soapbox 
This would make a great recurring column.
way ahead of you