Statue of Liberty — monument
Image by itou365 from Pixabay

Statue of Liberty

  • 2 min read
  • 40.689° N 74.044° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.
  • The statue was originally a coppery brown and turned green within about twenty years as the metal oxidised into a layer of verdigris.
  • The tablet in her left hand is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the American Declaration of Independence in Roman numerals.
  • Broken shackles and chains lie at her feet, half hidden by her robes and hard to see from the ground.
  • Her torch-bearing arm went on display in Philadelphia in 1876, where visitors could climb to the torch balcony, and her head was shown in Paris in 1878.
  • The figure is modelled on Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, who was especially honoured by freed slaves in ancient Rome.
  • Her pedestal, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, stands inside the walls of Fort Wood, an 1807–1811 army fort shaped like an eleven-pointed star.
  • The statue officially served as a lighthouse, but proved so ineffective that it was transferred to the War Department in 1901.
  • Popular accounts claim her face was modelled on Bartholdi's mother, though the monument's curator has said the story has no basis in fact.
  • Emma Lazarus wrote her sonnet The New Colossus in 1883 to raise money for the pedestal; a plaque bearing it was mounted inside the pedestal in 1903.

Why it is worth it

The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.

Bartholdi's first engineer was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect famous for restoring Notre-Dame, and his plan was almost defiantly old-fashioned: fill the statue's interior with sand-packed masonry compartments and let sheer weight keep her standing. Viollet-le-Duc died in 1879 with that plan unfinished, and Bartholdi turned instead to a bridge engineer named Gustave Eiffel — a decade before his tower made him famous. Eiffel threw out the masonry idea entirely and designed something closer to a skyscraper skeleton: a central iron pylon rising through the whole figure, with a secondary framework letting the thin copper skin flex slightly in wind and heat without cracking, the same engineering logic he would scale up for his tower five years later. So the internal skeleton that actually keeps Liberty standing is Eiffel's, not Viollet-le-Duc's — Viollet-le-Duc's lasting contribution, beyond the abandoned masonry scheme, was advising Bartholdi on the repoussé technique used to hammer the copper sheets and on the torch and arm supports.

She was a gift, but not a simple one: France paid for the statue itself through public subscription, while the United States was supposed to fund the pedestal — and Americans dragged their feet badly enough that fundraising nearly derailed the whole project until newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer shamed his readers into covering the shortfall with small donations. Dedicated in October 1886, she's officially recognised today as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, a designation that, given the argument above, arguably owes as much to Eiffel's ironwork as to Bartholdi's copper.

Getting there

4 km from Financial District. Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) is about 11 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Remarkable Monuments in the United States 5The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States 7The Most Remarkable Monuments Seen on Screen 7The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Squares, Streets and Monuments 8The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in the United States 14The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments Seen on Screen 19The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Monuments 20The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United States 24The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Squares, Streets and Monuments 33The Most Remarkable Monuments 56The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

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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