Statue Of Liberty

For six years, if you wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, you went to Madison Square Park. Not the whole statue, just the right arm and the torch, standing on a plinth in the middle of Manhattan while the rest of her was still being hammered out in Paris. For a small fee you could climb a ladder inside and stand on the balcony around the flame. It was a fundraising stunt, and it did not raise nearly enough. The arm went back into a crate.

The gift was French. Édouard de Laboulaye, a legal scholar, proposed a monument from the French people to mark a century of American independence. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi took the job, and he already had the figure in his head. A few years earlier he had pitched a colossal statue of a robed woman holding a lamp for the entrance to the Suez Canal; the Khedive of Egypt turned it down. New York got the second draft.

The engineering problem was the skin. The figure stands 151 feet tall, and her surface is copper beaten to a thickness of about three thirty-seconds of an inch, roughly two coins laid flat. A shell that thin cannot stand on its own. Bartholdi's first engineer, Viollet-le-Duc, died in 1879, and the work passed to Gustave Eiffel, whose tower was still a decade away. Eiffel built an iron pylon inside her and hung the copper from a web of flexible iron straps, so the skin could move in wind and heat without tearing. The hand and torch went to Philadelphia in 1876, the head to the Paris fair of 1878, and the rest followed in pieces.

The statue arrived in New York harbour in June 1885 aboard the French ship Isère, in 214 crates. The pedestal was unfinished and broke. Rich New Yorkers shrugged, Congress declined, and other cities offered to take the statue off New York's hands. Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, The World, to shame them. He promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift. More than 120,000 people sent money, most of them less than a dollar, and within five months the fund passed $100,000. The pedestal was finished, and the statue was dedicated on 28 October 1886. She was the colour of a new penny that day. The green came later, as the copper weathered; when the streaks spread in 1906 there was a proposal to paint her, and the public objected loudly enough to stop it.

Her early career was odd. She was not administered as a monument but as a lighthouse, under the Lighthouse Board, because the torch was lit at night. As a lighthouse she was useless; ships could barely see the light. The War Department took over in 1902, the National Park Service in 1933. The star-shaped fort she stands on, Fort Wood, is still there under the pedestal, and the island was Bedloe's Island until 1956.

Then the torch. On the night of 30 July 1916, a munitions depot on Black Tom Island, across the water in New Jersey, blew up. It was German sabotage aimed at supplies bound for the Allies. The blast shook the statue, and shrapnel damaged the arm and torch. The torch was closed to visitors and has never reopened. The torch she holds today is not even the original. During the 1984-86 restoration a new one, covered in gold leaf, was installed, and the old torch now sits in the museum on the island that opened in 2019.

That restoration reached all the way inside. The insulation Eiffel had placed between the iron straps and the copper skin had failed, and the two metals had been corroding each other for decades. Every iron strap was removed and replaced with stainless steel, one at a time, while the skin stayed in place. From the outside she is a nineteenth-century statue. Her skeleton is from the 1980s.

Two things most visitors never notice. At her feet lies a broken shackle and chain, invisible from the ground. And the tablet reads JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date rather than any word about liberty. Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus", with its line about huddled masses, in 1883 to help the pedestal fund; the poem was only fixed to the monument on a plaque in 1903.

She was closed for years after September 2001, with the crown reopening in 2009. Hurricane Sandy flooded the island in 2012 and shut her again until the following summer. Today she is managed by the National Park Service, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984, and receives millions of visitors a year. The copper has held up against the weather for nearly a century and a half. The low island under her feet, facing rising seas and harder storms, is the part nobody can promise.