92 Fun Facts About Statue of Liberty

Which federal agency has looked after the Statue of Liberty since 1933?

The National Park Service took over in 1933, when a presidential order moved the statue out of the War Department's hands; the Army kept the rest of the island until 1937.

Statue of Liberty sculptor Bartholdi also made which giant sandstone animal, set below the citadel of Belfort?

A lion: the Lion of Belfort, 22 metres long and finished in 1880, honours the town's months of resistance to a Prussian siege in 1870-71, when Bartholdi himself served as a militia officer.

What covered the statue's face until its 1886 unveiling?

A French flag veiled the face; Bartholdi, who was to release it on a signal, let it fall too early, and guns, whistles and cheers broke out while the speeches were still under way.

In 1984, UNESCO gave the Statue of Liberty which status, calling it a 'masterpiece of the human spirit'?

World Heritage Site status came in 1984, the year the statue closed for two years of repairs; UNESCO praised the way a sculptor and an engineer had joined art and engineering in one work.

What is the Statue of Liberty's formal title, announced with its French fundraising drive in 1875?

Liberty Enlightening the World was the name announced in 1875, when the Franco-American Union was formed to raise the statue's cost in France, leaving Americans to pay for the pedestal.

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

Seven rays fan out like sunbeams, a second way, besides the torch, that Liberty lights the world; they are widely read as standing for the seven seas and seven continents.

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.

In the poem on the Statue of Liberty's plaque, the 'huddled masses' are yearning to do what?

Breathe free: Emma Lazarus wrote the poem in 1883 for an auction funding the pedestal, and it was nearly forgotten until her friends had it cast in bronze and mounted there in 1903.

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

Édouard de Laboulaye, a scholar of the US Constitution who backed the Union in the Civil War, hoped a monument to American liberty would stir the French to demand democracy of their own.

What symbolic object lies 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.

For its 1885 voyage from France, the Statue of Liberty was taken apart into roughly how many pieces?

350 pieces, packed into 214 crates, crossed on the French navy ship Isère; they then waited on Bedloe's Island for almost a year because the pedestal was not finished.

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

Joseph Pulitzer ran daily appeals in his New York World when the pedestal fund ran dry and work stopped; more than 120,000 people gave, most of them a dollar or less.

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?

The ticker-tape parade began when traders near the Stock Exchange threw ticker tape from their windows as the dedication procession passed, and the city soon made it a standard welcome for heroes.

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.

The Statue of Liberty's copper skin is about as thick as which everyday objects pressed together?

Two pennies: the sheets are just 3/32 of an inch (2.4 mm) thick, hammered into shape by hand, which kept a 151-foot statue light enough to ship in crates and hang on an iron frame.

Which architect, famed for restoring France's medieval buildings, was the Statue of Liberty's first chief engineer?

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc settled on thin sheets of hammered copper for the skin, but he died in 1879 with the inside unresolved, and a second engineer had to work out how to hold it up.

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

The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia showed the arm and torch in 1876, and visitors climbed to the torch's balcony; the arm then spent years in a New York park to drum up donations.

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

An eleven-point star: New York State had ceded the island to the federal government for harbour defences, so the site Bartholdi wanted for his statue was already national property.

The New York World promised every donor to the statue's pedestal fund what reward?

Their name in print: the publisher vowed to list every giver, however small the sum, and gifts came in so fast that the stalled work on the pedestal was soon ordered to resume.

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.

Where in New York City did the statue's arm and torch stand for several years to raise money?

Madison Square Park kept the arm on show until 1882; it was then shipped back to France so that it could be joined to the rest of the statue.

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

A German sabotage explosion: agents blew up the Black Tom munitions depot on the New Jersey shore, packed with arms bound for the Allies, while the United States was still neutral in the First World War.

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

Calvin Coolidge made the statue a national monument in 1924 while the Army still held the island around it, and Ellis Island was folded into the monument four decades later.

Liberty Island sits in New Jersey waters but belongs to which New York City borough?

Manhattan: an 1834 compact ran the state line down the middle of the bay but left the island itself to New York, so it is an exclave of Manhattan ringed by New Jersey water.

Which car-industry boss chaired the 1980s commission that raised money to restore the Statue of Liberty?

Lee Iacocca, then Chrysler's chairman, was named by Reagan in 1982 to lead the drive; it raised more than $350 million from private donors to repair both the statue and Ellis Island.

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 eight years closed following 9/11, the Statue of Liberty's crown reopened in 2009 on which holiday?

Independence Day: the Interior Secretary announced the July 4 reopening as a 'special gift' to America, though only a limited number of visitors a day would be allowed to make the climb.

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.

What name does Emma Lazarus's poem give the Statue of Liberty?

Mother of Exiles is the poem's name for her, recasting a monument meant to honour liberty and Franco-American friendship as a welcome to immigrants arriving by sea.

Some of the Statue of Liberty's copper is said to have come from a mine at Visnes, in which country?

Norway: the Visnes mine on the island of Karmøy is traditionally credited with the metal, and the village has put up its own small replica, though tests on samples have never proved the link.

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 vetoed the $50,000 grant as governor in 1884; two years later, as president, he presided over the dedication of the statue he had declined to fund.

The Statue of Liberty's granite-faced pedestal has a core of what?

Poured concrete, up to 20 feet thick, forms the core: to save money, granite was used only for the outer facing, and the result was the largest mass of concrete poured up to that time.

The US Postal Service's 2010 'forever' stamp accidentally showed a Statue of Liberty replica in which city?

Las Vegas: the photo showed the replica outside the New York-New York casino, and its sculptor, Robert Davidson, later sued for copyright infringement and won $3.5 million from the Postal Service.

A quarter-size Statue of Liberty stands on an island in which river, facing west toward New York?

The Seine: the replica on the Île aux Cygnes in Paris was unveiled in 1889 facing east, into the city, and was turned around in 1937 to look west toward the original.

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

The 1878 Paris World's Fair showed the finished head and shoulders years before the body existed; such previews, like tickets to watch the workshop, kept French donations coming.

When New York's fund for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal ran dry, what did Boston and other cities offer to do?

Take the statue: Boston and several other cities offered to pay for the whole pedestal if it came to them instead, at a time when the state and Congress had each declined to put up public money.

Before the statue came, the Dutch named Liberty Island and two neighbours after which shellfish, plentiful in the bay?

Oysters: the tidal flats of the upper bay held vast oyster beds that fed the Lenape people, so Dutch settlers called the three islets the Oyster Islands.

Who vetoed Bartholdi's plan to ring the torch with floodlights 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.

In the 1700s, long before the statue, New York used Bedloe's Island as what kind of station for arriving ships?

A quarantine station: the city took over the island to inspect incoming ships and isolate smallpox cases, decades before the Army built its harbour fort there.

Libertas, the Roman goddess behind the Statue of Liberty, was especially honoured in ancient Rome by which group?

Freed slaves honoured Libertas, whose felt cap was the badge of a slave set free; by the 1800s artists used her figure as shorthand for republican ideals, which is how she reached New York Harbor.

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

Richard Morris Hunt first drew a pedestal 114 feet tall, but the fund's money troubles forced him to cut it down by about a quarter.

Rain and fog at the Statue of Liberty's 1886 dedication forced which event to wait four days?

The fireworks display was put back to November 1, but the day itself went ahead: the harbour flotilla sailed through the murk, and vast crowds stood in the rain to cheer the processions.

In 1977, nationalists demanding independence for which territory draped its flag across the statue's forehead?

Puerto Rico's flag was hung by nationalists who occupied the statue in October 1977; other groups have also seized it to protest causes from abortion to the invasion of Grenada.

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

Suffragists, shut out of a ceremony reserved almost wholly for men, chartered a boat, sailed as close as they could and gave speeches praising Liberty as a woman while demanding the vote.

How do visitors get from the pedestal up to the Statue of Liberty's crown?

By spiral staircase: two narrow stairways wind up through the iron frame to the crown, while the raised arm is so slim that only a single ladder fits inside it.

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

Planet of the Apes ends with astronaut Taylor finding the ruined statue on a beach and realising that the supposedly alien planet was Earth all along, long after a nuclear war.

In which 2008 monster film is the Statue of Liberty's severed head hurled into a New York street?

Cloverfield's makers took the image from the poster for the 1981 film 'Escape from New York', which shows the statue's head lying in a city street.

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 with positively charged slime and pilot it through streets of cheering New Yorkers; in 'Men in Black II' the torch instead hides a giant neuralyzer.

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 raised a giant curtain between two towers on Liberty Island, and when it dropped, a live audience and the CBS cameras saw only empty night sky ringed by lights.

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

Magneto sets up his mutation machine on the statue, aiming it at world leaders meeting on nearby Ellis Island, and the X-Men scale the statue to stop him.

Which NHL team wore the statue's head on its 'Lady Liberty' alternate jersey from 1996 to 2007?

The New York Rangers swapped their crest for the statue's head on a navy third jersey, and the design came back as a 'Reverse Retro' uniform in 2020-21 and again in 2022-23.

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

Princess Diana died in the road tunnel beneath the monument in August 1997, and mourners turned it into her shrine; the flame had been given to Paris in 1989 by a newspaper's donors.

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 ground to the tip of the torch, about how tall is the Statue of Liberty monument?

305 ft: the copper figure makes up only about half of that, 151 feet; the rest is the granite-faced pedestal and the old fort beneath it, which lift her high above the harbour.

Which US coin series, launched in 2007, carried the Statue of Liberty on the back of every coin?

Presidential dollars show a different president on the front and the statue on every back; the word 'Liberty' was left off the coins because her image was judged enough to say it.

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

China: censors reportedly asked Sony to remove the statue from 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?

The War of 1812 claimed Lt. Col. Eleazer Wood, who fell leading a sortie from Fort Erie in 1814; the harbour fort was later renamed in his memory.

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

Southeast: Bartholdi picked the island because every ship entering the harbour had to sail past it, so she was set to face the vessels coming in from the sea.

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 statue, echoing the Statue of Liberty, did students raise in Tiananmen Square in 1989?

The Goddess of Democracy, ten metres of foam and papier-mâché built in four days, stood for five before soldiers destroyed it; its student sculptors took care not to copy the New York statue outright.

Which youth organisation gave about 200 copper replicas of the Statue of Liberty to American towns around 1950?

The Boy Scouts marked their fortieth anniversary with a campaign called 'Strengthen the Arm of Liberty', and troops bought the eight-foot statues for parks and courthouses in 39 states.

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

Woodrow Wilson pressed the telegraph key after a newspaper's $30,000 lighting drive fell short and a wealthy donor quietly made up the difference, a secret kept until 1936.

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

Richard Nixon opened the American Museum of Immigration in 1972, but its backers never gave it an endowment, and it closed in 1991 once Ellis Island had an immigration museum of its own.

Which federal body ran the Statue of Liberty in the first years after its dedication?

The Lighthouse Board ran the statue as an aid to navigation, yet its torch never shone brightly enough to guide ships, and in 1901 the statue passed to the War Department.

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

A Petrarchan sonnet splits into eight lines and six, and Lazarus uses the break: the first part sets the new statue against the conquering giant of old, and the second lets her speak.

How long is the Statue of Liberty's nose?

4.5 feet: at that scale her head is roomy enough to hold an observation platform, where visitors look out over the harbour through the 25 windows of the crown.

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.

Which card company pledged a penny per purchase in 1983 to restore the statue?

American Express raised $1.7 million for the repairs, and the campaign paid its sponsor back: use of its cards rose by about 28 percent.

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

An Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature went to the hour-long film, in which Burns asked Americans such as James Baldwin and Mario Cuomo what liberty meant to them.

Which fashion designer led the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty Museum that opened on the island in 2019?

Diane von Fürstenberg headed the campaign for the $70 million museum, built because only about a fifth of the island's visitors could get into the old one inside the pedestal.

The sculptor who cut windows into the statue's torch in 1916 later carved which monument?

Mount Rushmore's Gutzon Borglum cut away much of the flame's copper in 1916 and set in yellow glass so that lamps inside could shine through, one more step in turning Bartholdi's solid copper flame into a lantern.

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

A sword: Karl Rossmann, packed off to America by his parents after a scandal with a housemaid, sees the statue's arm with the sword rise up as his ship glides into New York harbour.

A trick play named after the Statue of Liberty won the 2007 Fiesta Bowl for which underdog college team?

Boise State used it for the two-point conversion that beat Oklahoma 43-42 in overtime; the play, a faked pass with the ball handed off behind the quarterback's back, goes back to coach Amos Alonzo Stagg.

To stop the statue's copper skin and iron frame corroding each other, its builders separated them with shellac-soaked what?

Asbestos cloth was meant to keep the two metals from eating at each other, but it broke down over the decades, and the 1980s restorers replaced it with Teflon tape.

Which famous research institution gave up its weathered copper roof to patch the Statue of Liberty in the 1980s?

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.

A copy of the statue has stood since 2000 beside the Rainbow Bridge on the waterfront of which Asian capital?

Tokyo borrowed the Paris replica for a 'French year in Japan' in 1998, and after it went home a permanent copy was put up in the same spot at Odaiba.

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

'Women of the World Unite!' read the enormous banner that Bottini and the New York chapter of NOW draped over a railing; a year later anti-war veterans occupied the statue for three days.

In the 1670s, under colonial owner Isaac Bedloe, Liberty Island briefly carried which romantic-sounding name?

Love Island was the name Bedloe asked for in his 1670 land grant from Governor Francis Lovelace; it lasted until he died three years later, though adverts still gave it as an alias in the 1750s.

An 1876 gala raising French money for the statue premiered a Gounod cantata at which venue?

The Paris Opera hosted the evening, aimed at rich and powerful donors, with a cantata named after the statue; humbler gifts from schoolchildren and 181 French towns followed.

Restorers in the 1980s blasted old coal tar off the inside of the statue's skin with which kitchen staple?

Baking soda won out after cherry pits, salt, rice and sugar proved too harsh or too mild; it was donated by the ton and stripped the tar without scratching the copper.

How did workers reach the Statue of Liberty's skin to attach it in 1886?

Dangling from ropes: no scaffolding was raised around the statue, so riveters hung from its iron frame while steam-driven cranes and derricks hoisted each copper section up to them.

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

A missing comma: the plaque reads 'Keep ancient lands', dropping the comma after 'Keep', and it calls the poem 'engraved' although its raised letters were cast.

Which president came to Liberty Island in 1965 to sign the law ending national-origin immigration quotas?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act at the statue's foot, scrapping a quota system that had favoured northern and western Europeans since the 1920s.

Official ferries to the Statue of Liberty leave from New Jersey's Liberty State Park and from which New York spot?

The Battery, the old harbour-front park downtown, is the New York departure point, and the official ferry is the only way over: private boats are not allowed to dock at the island.

In which 1984 comedy does a naked woman walk ashore at the Statue of Liberty?

Splash sends its mermaid to New York with a lost wallet she has found; she walks ashore at the statue, is arrested for indecent exposure, and is released into the care of the wallet's owner.

In the 1980s the statue's rusted iron armature bars were replaced with which metal?

Stainless steel took over from the old iron, which had been rusting away wherever the layer meant to insulate it from the copper skin had broken down.

Which president signed the 1956 law that renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island?

Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the joint resolution in 1956, granting a change of name that Bartholdi himself had urged generations earlier.

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

Liquid nitrogen froze seven layers of old paint so brittle that they cracked and fell away from the copper; the tar beneath needed a gentler blasting that would not scratch the metal.