Bedloe's Island, New York Harbor

A French gift assembled in Manhattan

The Statue of Liberty was a diplomatic gift from the French Republic to the United States, commemorating the centennial of American independence — delivered ten years late.

The sculptor was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who had begun designing the statue in 1865. The interior iron skeleton was engineered by Gustave Eiffel, fresh from his work on the Garabit viaduct and three years before he would begin his eponymous tower in Paris.

The statue was completed in Paris in 1884, dismantled into 350 pieces packed in 214 crates, shipped across the Atlantic on the French frigate Isère, and reassembled on a star-shaped granite pedestal on Bedloe's Island between 1885 and 1886.

The dedication was held on 28 October 1886, in heavy fog.

Originally bright copper, not green

Liberty Enlightening the World was originally the bright reddish-orange of new copper. Not the familiar pale green of its modern appearance.

The patina that gives the statue its colour is a layer of copper carbonates, sulfates, and chlorides formed by 35 years of weathering. The process was effectively complete by about 1920.

There was a brief attempt in 1906 to paint the statue with copper-coloured paint to restore its original appearance. Public protest stopped the project before any paint was applied. The pale green has been the statue's official appearance ever since.

A monument to abolition

The statue's symbolism is more specific than the generic immigrant welcome it is now associated with.

Édouard de Laboulaye, the French legal scholar and abolitionist who proposed the gift in 1865 — the year the American Civil War ended and slavery was abolished — conceived of it as a celebration of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The broken chain at Liberty's feet — often missed in photographs because it is mostly hidden under her gown — represents the chain of slavery cast off.

Emma Lazarus's New Colossus poem ("give me your tired, your poor...") was written in 1883 for a fundraising auction to pay for the pedestal, and was attached to the base in 1903 — 17 years after the dedication. The immigration association developed afterward.

Climbed once with the lights off

The statue was not floodlit when it was dedicated in 1886.

Bartholdi had argued for floodlighting throughout the design process, but the American sponsors had not budgeted for it. The first lighting system was installed in 1916, with electric arc lamps illuminating the torch from inside.

Visitors could climb a spiral staircase inside the statue's body to a small observation platform inside the crown — seven small windows — and during the early years, up into the torch itself. The torch was closed to visitors in 1916 when one of the bracket-mounting bolts failed.

In 1986, during the statue's centennial restoration, the entire torch was replaced with a new copper-and-gold-leaf replica.