98 Fun Facts About Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty was a diplomatic gift to the United States from the people of which country?

The deal was that the French would pay for the statue (about $250,000) while Americans paid for the pedestal (up to $300,000), an arrangement that drew grumbling in the US press about a gift that came with a bill.

Which French sculptor is credited with designing the Statue of Liberty?

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, an Alsatian-born sculptor, designed the statue; his other monumental work includes the Lion of Belfort, carved into the cliff below that town's citadel.

The internal metal framework of the Statue of Liberty was designed by which renowned engineer?

Gustave Eiffel took over after the original engineer died in 1879, replacing a planned masonry pier with an iron truss tower flexible enough to let the copper skin move without cracking.

In what year was the Statue of Liberty officially dedicated in New York Harbor?

Dedicated October 28, 1886; a morning parade down Broadway preceded the harbor ceremony on Bedloe's Island, where the statue's face stayed veiled with a French flag until the unveiling.

What is the primary material covering the exterior of the Statue of Liberty?

The exterior is copper, hammered into shape from the inside over wooden forms; Eiffel insulated it from the iron frame with shellac-soaked asbestos to stop the two metals corroding each other.

What is the official full title Bartholdi gave the colossal statue in New York Harbor?

Bartholdi titled the statue 'Liberty Enlightening the World'; the Franco-American Union announced the name in 1875 with its fundraising drive, and the torch she lifts is the 'light' of the title.

How many rays radiate from the crown of the Statue of Liberty?

Seven rays; the popular reading that they stand for the seven seas and seven continents has never been confirmed, and Bartholdi described them as a halo, or aureole, of light.

What date is inscribed in Roman numerals on the Statue of Liberty's tablet?

July 4, 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence, appears as JULY IV MDCCLXXVI; the tablet is a tabula ansata, a handled form from Roman art chosen to evoke the idea of law.

What does the torch held by the Statue of Liberty primarily symbolize?

The torch stands for enlightenment, light leading the way to liberty; the statue was even run as a working lighthouse after its dedication, though its glow was too feeble to guide ships.

Which French abolitionist first proposed a statue commemorating liberty for the United States?

The idea supposedly surfaced over dinner at Laboulaye's home near Versailles, where the young sculptor Bartholdi was a guest; the Franco-Prussian War then stalled the project until 1875.

What symbolic items are found at the feet of the Statue of Liberty?

Bartholdi first wanted Liberty to hold the broken chain in her hand but judged that too divisive so soon after the Civil War, so it ended up under her robes at her feet, almost invisible from the ground.

Into roughly how many pieces was the Statue of Liberty disassembled for its 1885 voyage aboard the Isère?

Bartholdi's workshop cut the statue into 350 pieces, packed in 214 crates, which the Isère delivered to New York Harbor on 17 June 1885; the pieces sat for almost a year while Americans raised money to finish the pedestal.

Which newspaper publisher led the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?

When fundraising for the pedestal stalled in the U.S., newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a successful campaign in his paper, the New York World, asking for public donations.

What colour was the Statue of Liberty when she was first completed and dedicated, before twenty years of weathering?

Reddish-brown and shiny at first, she oxidised to green within twenty years; Congress, thinking the verdigris was corrosion, voted money to paint her, and the public outcry helped save the patina, which actually protects the copper.

The Statue of Liberty's 1886 dedication procession gave rise to which New York tradition?

Office boys in the financial district threw ticker tape from windows as the dedication procession passed down Broadway, the first ticker-tape parade; the tradition later honored Lindbergh, astronauts and championship teams.

Before New York, Bartholdi pitched a similar torch-bearing colossus for which waterway?

Bartholdi proposed 'Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia' for the Suez Canal entrance at Port Said: a lighthouse shaped like a robed Egyptian peasant woman holding a torch. Khedive Isma'il Pasha turned it down over the cost.

How thick are the copper sheets that form the statue's skin?

About 2.4 mm (0.094 in) is all it takes: the sheets were shaped by repoussé, heated and beaten with wooden hammers, which kept the whole statue light for its volume.

Which architect, Bartholdi's mentor, was the Statue of Liberty's first chief engineer and chose copper for the skin?

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Bartholdi's mentor, chose copper for the skin and planned to fill the statue with sand-filled masonry compartments; after his death in 1879, Eiffel replaced that idea with an iron pylon.

The statue's completed arm and torch were first shown in the United States at which event?

The completed arm and torch were shown at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where visitors paid to climb to the balcony; it then stood in Madison Square Park until 1882 before returning to France.

The statue's pedestal stands inside Fort Wood, a disused army base built in the shape of what?

Fort Wood, completed in 1811, is an eleven-point star fort; its granite walls now ring the pedestal, and the fort stayed an Army post into the 1930s.

Roughly what share of the New York World's pedestal fund came in gifts under a dollar?

80 percent of the money came in sums of less than one dollar, from about 120,000 people, over five months of daily appeals in the New York World.

Which Central Park co-designer supervised the clean-up of Bedloe's Island before the 1886 dedication?

Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park, supervised the clean-up of Bedloe's Island before the October 1886 dedication; the crated statue had sat there since the Isère arrived in June 1885.

Which president moved the statue to the War Department in 1901 as it was useless as a lighthouse?

Its torch produced only a faint gleam on dedication night, and the statue was practically invisible after dark.

Public access to the statue's torch has been barred since 1916, after damage from what?

The blast on the Jersey City peninsula damaged the torch-bearing right arm and closed the statue for ten days.

Which president used the Antiquities Act in 1924 to declare the statue a national monument?

Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the Statue of Liberty a national monument on October 15, 1924, under the Antiquities Act; Ellis Island was added to the monument by Lyndon Johnson's proclamation in 1965.

In what year did Congress officially rename Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island?

Congress renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island in 1956, a change Bartholdi had urged in the 1880s; the island had carried the Bedloe name since merchant Isaac Bedloe owned it in the 1660s.

Which Chrysler chairman led the $350 million 1980s restoration commission for the statue?

Reagan named Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca to head the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission in May 1982; the statue closed for renovation in 1984 and reopened for the July 1986 centennial.

The replacement torch installed in 1986 has a flame covered in what?

The 1986 torch's copper flame is covered in 24-karat gold leaf, following Bartholdi's original design; the old torch, leaking water since its 1916 alterations, was retired to the island's museum.

Which French president attended the statue's 1986 centennial rededication alongside Ronald Reagan?

François Mitterrand, French president since 1981, joined Ronald Reagan on July 3, 1986, as Reagan relit the torch to open 'Liberty Weekend'; Reagan declared, 'We are the keepers of the flame of liberty.'

After 9/11, the Statue of Liberty's crown stayed closed until it reopened as a 'special gift' on which date?

The crown reopened on July 4, 2009, announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as a 'special gift' to the nation; the pedestal had reopened in 2004, with crown climbs limited to small timed groups.

The statue reopened on 28 October 2012, only to close a day later ahead of which storm?

Hurricane Sandy made landfall on 29 October 2012, the day after the statue reopened from a year-long safety renovation; the storm spared the statue but wrecked the ferry docks on Liberty and Ellis Islands.

In which year was 'The New Colossus' engraved on a plaque and affixed to the statue's base?

The sonnet, written in 1883 for a pedestal fundraising auction, was largely forgotten until a friend of the poet had it cast on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal in 1903.

Roughly how much copper did industrialist Eugène Secrétan donate for the statue?

Eugène Secrétan, a French copper industrialist, donated 128,000 lb (58 tonnes) of copper to the project; the metal is widely believed to have come from the Visnes mine on Norway's Karmøy island.

The statue's second toes are longer than its big toes, a condition known as what?

Morton's toe — a second toe longer than the big toe, also called 'Greek foot' — is the foot shape Greek and Roman sculptors gave idealized figures, and Bartholdi followed that classical convention.

As New York governor in 1884, which future president vetoed a $50,000 bill for the Statue of Liberty?

Grover Cleveland, then New York's governor, vetoed the $50,000 appropriation in 1884 as an improper use of state funds; two years later, as president, he presided over the statue's dedication.

The Stony Creek granite of the statue's pedestal was quarried in which state?

Stony Creek granite comes from quarries in Branford, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound; it faces the pedestal's concrete core, and Freemasons laid the cornerstone in August 1884.

The US Postal Service's 2010 'forever' stamp meant to show the statue actually depicted which replica?

The replica stands outside the New York-New York Hotel and Casino.

A smaller Statue of Liberty stands on which Seine island in Paris, facing west toward her larger sister in New York?

The Île aux Cygnes replica looks west toward New York; Bartholdi's home province of Alsace had been lost to Prussia while the project was gestating.

The statue's head was exhibited at which event before the whole figure was assembled?

The completed head was shown at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, where visitors climbed inside it; at other times the public could buy tickets to watch construction at the Paris workshop.

Which future president sat, aged 19, on the New York committee raising money for the statue's pedestal?

Committees were also formed in Boston and Philadelphia; the New York one later hired Richard Morris Hunt.

Bartholdi's 151-foot height was double Italy's Sancarlone and which German monument built by the same copper method?

The Hermannsdenkmal near Detmold, a copper repoussé statue of Arminius finished in 1875, and the 76-foot Sancarlone at Arona on Lago Maggiore were each about half Liberty's 151-foot height.

Who vetoed Bartholdi's floodlights on the torch balcony a week before the dedication?

The Army Corps of Engineers vetoed the balcony floodlights a week before the dedication, fearing they would blind ships' pilots; Bartholdi instead cut portholes in the torch and put the lights inside, producing only a faint gleam.

Which classical wonder, a harbour statue of Helios, was the ancient precedent for Bartholdi's lighthouse-statue ideas?

The Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze Helios that stood at that island's harbour in the third century BC, is the 'brazen giant of Greek fame' that Emma Lazarus's sonnet 'The New Colossus' sets against a 'mighty woman with a torch'.

Which Roman goddess inspired the statue's classically draped figure?

Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, was popular among freed slaves in ancient Rome, and 18th- and 19th-century artists used her to evoke republican ideals.

Which architect designed the statue's pedestal, blending Doric portals with Aztec touches?

Money troubles cut his proposed 114-foot pedestal to 89 feet and replaced solid granite with concrete faced in granite.

Which French metalwork foundry built the statue in its Paris workshop?

Gaget, Gauthier & Co., a metalworking firm in Paris's 17th arrondissement, built the statue; tickets to watch construction there were sold to raise funds, alongside a lottery with a terracotta model as a prize.

Who mistakenly let the French flag fall from the statue's face before the dedication speech ended?

Bartholdi, stationed in the torch, mistook a pause in Senator William Evarts's speech for its conclusion and released the French flag veiling the face; the cheering drowned out the rest of the speech.

Which group, barred from the island at the 1886 dedication, chartered a boat to protest nearby?

Suffragists, offended that only two women — Bartholdi's wife and de Lesseps's granddaughter — were allowed on the island, chartered a boat, sailed as close as they could and made speeches advocating the vote.

In which Parisian suburb were the components of Eiffel's central pylon made?

Eiffel's factory in Levallois-Perret, just north-west of Paris, made the pylon's parts; his secondary skeleton lets the copper skin flex slightly in harbour winds and summer heat via 'saddles' of iron straps.

In which 1968 film is the Statue of Liberty found half-buried in sand in the final scene?

Planet of the Apes ends with the ruined statue, a motif that goes back to John Ames Mitchell's 1889 novel 'The Last American', set among New York's ruins a thousand years on.

Which insurance company built its logo around the Statue of Liberty?

Liberty Mutual, the Boston-based insurer founded in 1912, built its branding around the statue's torch and crown; the Libertarian Party also uses her as its emblem.

According to a popular legend, whose face was the model for the statue's?

The sculptor's mother, Charlotte Bartholdi, is the face named in the most repeated legend; the curator of the Bartholdi Museum says that story, like other such speculations, has no basis in fact.

In 'Ghostbusters II' (1989), what do the Ghostbusters make the statue do?

The Ghostbusters make the statue come to life, coating it with positively charged mood slime and walking it through Manhattan to the museum; in 'Men in Black II' the torch instead hides a giant neuralyzer.

The WNBA's New York Liberty logo turns which part of the statue into a basketball?

The torch flame doubles as a basketball in the New York Liberty logo; the team, formed in 1996, took its name from the statue and its seafoam green from her patina.

On D-Day in 1944, the statue's lights flashed the Morse code for which letter?

Dot-dot-dot-dash is Morse for V — V for Victory; wartime blackouts otherwise kept her dark, and she was not lit all night, every night until 1957.

Which illusionist made the statue 'disappear' on live television in April 1983?

David Copperfield vanished the statue on 8 April 1983 in a CBS special watched by an estimated fifty million viewers; Guinness lists it as the largest illusion ever staged.

Which villain uses the statue as his base in the 2000 film 'X-Men'?

Magneto builds his mutation machine in the statue's torch for the film's climax; in John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York' (1981) Liberty Island is instead the command post for the Manhattan island prison.

Which NHL team put the statue's head on its third jersey starting in 1997?

The New York Rangers wore 'Lady Liberty' third jerseys from the 1996–97 season, with the statue's head replacing the crest; the 1996 NCAA Men's Final Four logo, played at the Meadowlands, also used her.

Paris's 'Flame of Liberty', a full-size copy of the torch, became a memorial to whom in 1997?

Diana, Princess of Wales, died in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel beneath the monument in August 1997, and mourners made it her unofficial shrine; the International Herald Tribune had given Paris the flame in 1989.

In 1946 the statue's interior was coated with plastic so that what could be washed off?

Graffiti: visitors had long scratched and scrawled on the inside of the copper skin wherever they could reach, so in 1946 the reachable interior was coated with a plastic that let the marks be washed away.

From the foundation at ground level to the tip of the torch, how tall is the monument?

305 feet: the figure alone is 151 feet, the pedestal adds 89 feet and the foundation another 65, making the monument about 93 metres from ground level to the tip of the torch.

Which circulating US coin series carried the statue on its reverse from 2007?

The Presidential $1 coins, issued from 2007, carry the statue on the reverse; she also appears on New York's 2001 state quarter, and two images of her torch are printed on the ten-dollar bill.

'Spider-Man: No Way Home' was reportedly denied release in which country over its statue-set climax?

China: censors reportedly asked Sony to cut or shrink the statue in the 2021 film's climax, Sony refused, and the film never received a Chinese release.

Fort Wood, the statue's base, is named for an officer killed in which war?

Lt. Col. Eleazer Derby Wood fell in the War of 1812, at the Siege of Fort Erie in September 1814; the fort on Bedloe's Island, finished in 1811, was renamed in his honour.

The statue was aligned to face which compass direction, greeting ships from the Atlantic?

She faces southeast, toward the lower harbor and ships arriving from the Atlantic, with her back to New Jersey; the pedestal's concrete mass was the largest single pour up to that time.

The climax of Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 film 'Saboteur' takes place where on the statue?

The climax is on the torch: the saboteur Fry dangles from the torch's hand and falls when his sleeve tears; the real torch had been off-limits to the public since 1916.

Which sculpture, raised briefly in Tiananmen Square in 1989, drew on the same French ideals?

The Goddess of Democracy, a 10-metre foam-and-papier-mâché figure raised on 30 May 1989, stood four days before troops destroyed it; its student sculptors deliberately avoided a direct imitation of the New York statue.

How many interior spiral staircases were built for visitors climbing to the crown?

Two interior spiral staircases were built to make it easier for visitors to reach the observation point in the crown; the torch, by contrast, was reached by a single 40-foot ladder squeezed inside the narrow arm.

Which president pressed a telegraph key on 2 December 1916 to switch on the statue's floodlights?

Woodrow Wilson pressed the telegraph key on 2 December 1916; the New York World's publisher Ralph Pulitzer had run the $30,000 lighting drive, and a wealthy donor quietly covered the shortfall, a secret kept until 1936.

Which president opened the American Museum of Immigration in the statue's base in 1972?

Richard Nixon dedicated the American Museum of Immigration in the pedestal on 26 September 1972; it never received an endowment and closed in 1991, once Ellis Island had opened its own immigration museum.

Which federal body took charge of the statue in 1887, the year after its dedication?

Despite its promises to boost the torch, the statue stayed nearly invisible at night, and in 1901 it passed to the Army as useless for navigation.

The statue's sculptor was born in 1834 in which Alsatian town, now home to a museum of his work?

Colmar, where Bartholdi was born on 2 August 1834, houses the Musée Bartholdi in his family home; a replica of the statue was dedicated there on 4 July 2004, the centenary of his death from tuberculosis.

What poetic form is Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus'?

It is a Petrarchan sonnet — an octave rhyming ABBAABBA, then a sestet; its 'twin cities' are New York and Brooklyn, separate until 1898, and its 'imprisoned lightning' is the torch's then-novel electric light.

How long is the statue's nose?

The nose is 4 ft 6 in (1.37 m) long; her mouth is three feet wide, her index finger eight feet long, and her waist 35 feet thick.

The statue's stance, right foot raised and set back, is an example of which classical pose?

Contrapposto: her weight rests on the left leg while the right heel lifts, so from the front she looks still and from the side she seems to stride, a tension between standing and moving that Bartholdi wanted.

A 1983 American Express promotion gave how much to the restoration per card transaction?

One cent per card transaction (and a dollar per new card issued) went to the restoration; the 1983 campaign raised $1.7 million and is counted among the earliest examples of cause marketing.

Ken Burns's 1985 documentary about the statue earned a nomination for what?

It aired on PBS. A 2019 film, 'Liberty: Mother of Exiles', later followed the building of the island's new museum.

After the COVID-19 closure of March 2020, when did the crown finally reopen to visitors?

The crown reopened on 11 October 2022, two and a half years after the March 2020 shutdown; the island itself had reopened partially in July 2020, while Ellis Island stayed shut longer.

Who redesigned the torch in 1916, replacing much of its metal with stained glass?

Gutzon Borglum, who went on to carve Mount Rushmore, cut away much of the torch's copper in 1916 and inserted stained glass; the altered torch leaked water for decades until it was swapped for a faithful replica in 1986.

In Franz Kafka's novel 'Amerika', what does the statue hold instead of a torch?

A sword: Karl Rossmann, arriving in New York harbour, sees the goddess holding a sword aloft in place of the torch; the unfinished novel, written around 1912–14, was published in 1927, three years after Kafka's death.

Which coach is credited with first calling the football trick play named after the statue?

Stagg credited Clarence Herschberger as the first to run it. Boise State's version beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl.

Which president, taking office in March 1877, selected Bedloe's Island as the statue's site?

Rutherford B. Hayes, who took office in March 1877, selected the Bedloe's Island site Bartholdi had proposed; Grant had signed the joint resolution accepting the statue on 3 March 1877, his last full day in office.

Artist John LaFarge said the statue's first sketches were drawn in his studio in which state?

Rhode Island: John La Farge maintained that Bartholdi drew the first sketches in his Newport studio during the 1871 American trip; Bartholdi later married Jeanne-Émilie Baheux in Newport in December 1876, on his second visit.

Replacement skin for the 1980s repairs came from the roof of which institution?

Bell Labs gave up a copper roof whose patina closely matched the statue's; in return the laboratory got pieces of the old skin to test, and most of the original copper skin stayed in place.

Who drove the first rivet into the statue's skin, at the big toe?

Levi P. Morton, US minister to France, drove the ceremonial first rivet into the big toe in 1881; the skin was not built toe to head, however — several segments rose at once, baffling workshop visitors.

In 1970, Ivy Bottini's NOW protest hung a banner from the statue reading what?

'Women of the World Unite!' read the enormous banner Bottini and NOW's New York chapter draped over a railing in 1970; a year later fifteen anti-war veterans occupied the statue and flew a flag upside down.

Phillip Ratner's group of statues at the island's western end honours how many people?

Five: three Frenchmen — the sculptor, the engineer and the project's instigator — stand with two Americans, the newspaper publisher and the poet, in Maryland sculptor Phillip Ratner's group at the island's western end.

Which composer wrote an 1876 cantata about the statue for a Paris Opera fundraising gala?

Charles Gounod, composer of 'Faust', wrote the cantata for the 25 April 1876 gala at the Paris Opera, which targeted rich and powerful donors; schoolchildren and 181 French municipalities gave as well.

The 1986 centennial coin set paired a clad 50-cent piece and a silver dollar with which gold coin?

The half eagle, the $5 gold piece, shows a close-up of her face; the silver dollar's reverse pairs the torch with lines from 'The New Colossus'.

Shrapnel from the Black Tom explosion stopped the Jersey Journal's tower clock at what time?

2:12 am, minutes after the 2:08 am blast, which registered like a magnitude 5.0 to 5.5 earthquake, shattered windows in Times Square and woke sleepers as far away as Maryland.

What error appears on the bronze plaque of 'The New Colossus' inside the pedestal?

The comma after 'Keep' in the 'ancient lands' line is absent, and the plaque calls itself an engraving though it is actually a casting.

Which writer talked Emma Lazarus into contributing a poem to the 1883 pedestal auction?

Constance Cary Harrison, a writer helping organize the auction, pressed her; Lazarus had refused at first, saying she could not write a poem about a statue, but was then aiding Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms.

A coppersmith in which southern French town made one of the statue's fingers?

By 1882 the figure stood complete to the waist, which the sculptor marked by serving reporters lunch on a platform built inside it.

A replica cast by the sculptor was unveiled in Buenos Aires how many days before the original?

25 days: the Buenos Aires statue went up on 3 October 1886 in Barrancas de Belgrano park, before the 28 October dedication in New York, and bears the Paris address of the Val d'Osne foundry.

Norwegian immigrant engineer Joachim Giæver did what for the statue?

Working from the French drawings and sketches, he handled the design computations and fabrication drawings on the American side.

The stainless-steel bars that hold the skin's staples since the 1980s are made of which alloy?

Ferralium, a stainless-steel alloy that bends slightly and springs back as the statue moves, replaced the entire original puddled-iron armature; Teflon film separates the new bars from the copper skin.

Under what pseudonym did the statue's sculptor sign his rare paintings?

Amilcar Hasenfratz was the name Bartholdi put on his rare paintings; he had trained as a painter under Ary Scheffer before sculpture took over his career entirely.

What did workers use in the 1980s to strip decades of paint from inside the skin?

Liquid nitrogen froze and flaked off seven layers of paint; beneath lay two layers of coal tar, blasted off with baking soda to spare the metal, while the crews wore so-called 'Moon suits'.