Dedicated on October 28, 1886, and sculpted by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the statue itself stands 151 feet tall — 305 feet including its pedestal.
Crown and pedestal access require reservations booked well ahead of time (crown tickets can sell out months in advance), and every visitor passes through mandatory security screening before boarding the ferry, so arrive early.
Bartholdi's figure is a shell. The copper skin is roughly three thirty-seconds of an inch thick — about the thickness of two pennies laid together — and was shaped by repoussé, sheets heated and beaten by hand against wooden forms until they took the curve of a fold or a knuckle. Skin that thin carries nothing. The load is taken by an iron pylon inside, engineered by Gustave Eiffel with Maurice Koechlin, from which flat iron bars reach out to saddles riveted to the copper.
Those saddles are the reason the statue has lasted. Rather than fixing the skin rigidly to the frame, Eiffel let each sheet slide slightly against its support, so the copper can expand in summer heat and flex in harbor wind without tearing at its rivets. It is a curtain wall — a skin hung on a frame that carries the load — worked out in the 1880s, before the tall office buildings of Chicago and New York made the principle routine.
The pedestal was the American half of the bargain, and it nearly did not happen. Richard Morris Hunt designed it, then cut it from a planned 114 feet to 89 on grounds of cost, and Joseph Pulitzer raised the shortfall through small donations solicited in his newspaper. It sits inside Fort Wood, an eleven-pointed star of 1807 to 1811 whose walls give the base its odd geometry. From November 1886 until March 1902 the torch was operated as a navigational light, the first American lighthouse lit by electricity.
Eiffel had insulated copper from iron with asbestos soaked in shellac, guarding against galvanic corrosion in salt air. By the 1980s that barrier had failed and rusting armature bars were prying the skin apart from within. The 1984 to 1986 restoration replaced roughly 1,800 of them with stainless steel and installed a new copper torch finished in gold leaf, modeled on Bartholdi's original design. The torch it replaced is now displayed indoors on the island.
Liberty Island, New York, NY 10004 · Official site ↗
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture of a robed and crowned woman on Liberty Island, part of New York City, in New York Harbor. The copper-clad statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and its metal framework built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
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