Must-seeUNESCO

Statue of Liberty

France’s gift for America’s centennial, and the first thing millions of immigrants saw in the harbor

Local name: Statue of Liberty

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The story

Before you is the Statue of Liberty. The idea of giving America a statue of liberty for the centennial of its independence came from the Frenchman Édouard de Laboulaye in 1865. The sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue, and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, the same Eiffel who later built the tower in Paris, designed the iron framework inside. The statue was assembled in Paris and presented to the American minister on the fourth of July 1884. Then it was taken apart, and on the seventeenth of June 1885 the French ship Isère brought it to New York. America was short of money for the pedestal. So the publisher Joseph Pulitzer ran a fundraising campaign in his newspaper, and within six months the money was there. On the twenty-eighth of October 1886, President Grover Cleveland accepted the statue on behalf of the United States. The copper skin, as thin as two pennies pressed together, was brown at first. It took about thirty years of oxidation to turn green. In her left hand is a tablet with the date of independence in Roman numerals: July fourth, 1776. Broken chains lie at her feet, but you cannot see them from the ground. The crown has twenty-five windows and seven rays. From the ground to the tip of the torch is 305 feet. Today’s torch is the second one: the original was removed in 1984 and now stands in the museum on the island. In 1903 a plaque with Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” was mounted on the pedestal, a poem about a land that welcomes the tired and the poor of the whole world.

Visiting

Liberty Island. The only way to get there is the Statue City Cruises ferry, from The Battery in Manhattan or from Liberty State Park in New Jersey. Ferry tickets are paid and sold only by Statue City Cruises; buy them in advance. There is airport-style security before boarding, and in summer and on weekends the line can take more than an hour. The pedestal and the crown need separate reserved tickets, and there are few of them. The crown is 162 steps up, with no elevator.

Photos

Sources

• National Park Service — Liberty Island: A Chronology
• National Park Service — Statue of Liberty Statistics
• National Park Service — Statue of Liberty FAQs
• National Park Service — Statue of Liberty: People
• National Park Service — Statue of Liberty: Plan Your Visit

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