There's a substance on my Earth that my team and I discovered called psychomagnotheric slime. Mood slime, to put it more simply. It reacts empathically with human emotion. It had been flowing under New York for decades, and was initially intended to draw power from the negative emotions blanketing the city to provide that energy to an evil Sumerian deity. After we defeated the god, the river's power was basically hijacked by the ghost of a medieval tyrant who used it to entrap a friend of mine and her son in the Manhattan Museum of Art behind a shell of hardened slime so he could gain a new body by possessing the kid.

Considering how long it had been soaking in negative emotions, we needed something big to pump up New York's emotional state to weaken the slime enough to break through. So we soaked the Statue of Liberty in a positively charged variant of the slime, played some Higher and Higher to bring her to life, and walked her straight from Liberty Island to the museum.