🗽The Statue of Liberty

Liberty Enlightening the World

The Statue of Liberty is a 305-foot colossus standing on an island in New York Harbor, welcoming arriving ships and symbolizing American freedom to the world. Sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and structurally engineered by Gustave Eiffel — the same engineer who later built the Eiffel Tower — she was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States and was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

A Gift from France

The statue was conceived in 1865 by French jurist and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye, who proposed a monument from France to the United States to commemorate both the centennial of American independence and the Union's victory in the Civil War — a victory that had ended slavery. The French people would pay for the statue; the Americans would pay for the pedestal. Fundraising on both sides took more than a decade and nearly collapsed multiple times. On the American side, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a campaign in his New York World that raised more than $100,000 from 120,000 mostly small donors.

Design and Construction

Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue as a classical figure of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom. She holds a torch in her raised right hand and, in her left, a tablet inscribed with the date "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" — July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet, symbolizing freedom from tyranny. Her crown has seven rays, representing the seven continents and seven seas.

The statue is made of copper sheets about the thickness of two pennies, hammered into shape over wooden forms. The copper weighs about 62,000 pounds. It is hung on a massive iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel — a flexible internal structure that allows the copper skin to expand and contract with temperature and to sway slightly in the wind. The statue was assembled in Paris, inspected by President Ulysses S. Grant's successor, and then disassembled into 350 pieces packed in 214 crates for shipment to the United States in 1885.

The New Colossus

In 1883, American poet Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet called "The New Colossus" to help raise money for the pedestal. Its final lines have since become inseparable from the meaning of the statue itself:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem was inscribed on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal in 1903, twenty years after it was written and sixteen years after Lazarus's death. It transformed the statue's meaning — from a monument to republican liberty to a welcome to immigrants.

Ellis Island

From 1892 to 1954, the immigration station at Ellis Island — directly next to Liberty Island — processed more than 12 million immigrants arriving in the United States. The statue was the first thing they saw. Roughly 40 percent of all Americans alive today are descended from someone who passed through Ellis Island. Both islands are now part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, jointly administered by the National Park Service.

Restoration and Recent History

By the 1980s, a century of weather had badly corroded the torch and parts of the iron framework. A two-year restoration from 1984 to 1986, funded by private donations, replaced the torch with a new gold-leaf version, installed modern elevators, and brought the monument up to current safety standards. A rededication ceremony on July 4, 1986 marked the statue's centennial. After the September 11 attacks, the statue was closed to visitors for nearly three years. It reopened fully in 2009.

Statue of Liberty Facts

• The statue weighs about 225 tons. Her index finger alone is 8 feet long.
• Her crown contains 25 windows, offering visitors a panoramic view of New York Harbor.
• Her complete name is "Liberty Enlightening the World" — La Liberté éclairant le monde.
• Her sandals are U.S. size 879 — if she were a woman, she would be a giant indeed.
• She was the tallest iron structure ever built at the time of her completion.