Statue of Liberty

Statue of Liberty, colossal statue on Liberty Island in the Upper New York Bay, U.S., commemorating the friendship of the peoples of the United States and France. Standing 305 feet (93 metres) high including its pedestal, it represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet bearing the adoption date of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) in her left. The torch, which measures 29 feet (8.8 metres) from the flame tip to the bottom of the handle, is accessible via a 42-foot (12.8-metre) service ladder inside the arm (this ascent was open to the public from 1886 to 1916). An elevator carries visitors to the observation deck in the pedestal, which may also be reached by stairway, and a spiral staircase leads to an observation platform in the figure’s crown. A plaque at the pedestal’s entrance is inscribed with a sonnet, “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus. It was written to help raise money for the pedestal, and it reads:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

A French historian, Édouard de Laboulaye, made the proposal for the statue in 1865. Funds were contributed by the French people, and work began in France in 1875 under sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The statue was constructed of copper sheets, hammered into shape by hand and assembled over a framework of four gigantic steel supports, designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. The colossus was presented to the American minister to France Levi Morton (later vice president) in a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884. In 1885 the completed statue, 151 feet 1 inch (46 metres) high and weighing 225 tons, was disassembled and shipped to New York City. The pedestal, designed by American architect Richard Morris Hunt and built within the walls of Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island, was completed later. The statue, mounted on its pedestal, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. Over the years the torch underwent several modifications, including its conversion to electric power in 1916 and its redesign (with repoussé copper sheathed in gold leaf) in the mid-1980s, when the statue was repaired and restored by both American and French workers for a centennial celebration held in July 1986. The site was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1984.

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The statue was at first administered by the U.S. Lighthouse Board, as the illuminated torch was considered a navigational aid. Because Fort Wood was still an operational Army post, responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the statue was transferred in 1901 to the War Department. It was declared a national monument in 1924, and in 1933 the administration of the statue was placed under the National Park Service. Fort Wood was deactivated in 1937, and the rest of the island was incorporated into the monument. In 1956 Bedloe’s Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965 nearby Ellis Island, once the country’s major immigration station, was added to the monument’s jurisdiction, bringing its total area to about 58 acres (about 24 hectares). Exhibits on the history of the Statue of Liberty, including the statue’s original 1886 torch, were contained in the statue’s base until 2018, when they were moved to the adjacent Statue of Liberty Museum.