By the 1960s and 1970s, the public’s powerful interest in the Statue of Liberty and its status as a magnet for international tourism made it imperative to attend to the monument’s physical deterioration. A century of salt spray, sea air, and high winds had made the structure unstable, even dangerous. Still, the American government, struggling with the stagflation of the 1970s and recession of the early ’80s, dragged its feet. Only in 1981, when a group of French architects and engineers outlined the statue’s serious structural problems, did the effort to restore the monument begin. Soon the National Park Service got involved, as did a private American architectural firm. Ultimately, a new Franco-American Committee, not unlike Bartholdi’s original one, took shape to oversee the restoration project. It quickly became clear that the makeover would be expensive, and the committee set out to raise the required funds.
The French authors of the statue’s structural assessment possessed impressive credentials. One was a graduate of both the Ecole polytechnique, France’s equivalent of MIT, and the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, the country’s leading art and architectural school. Another was a master metallurgical artisan expert in the delicate techniques of hammered copper work. A pair of leading structural and mechanical engineers rounded out the team. To collaborate with the French groupement, the Franco-American Committee enlisted an American architectural firm, Swank Hayden Connell, experienced in historic restoration, and the structural engineers Ammann & Whitney.
Despite good intentions on both sides, cultural differences and language barriers made it difficult for the French and American specialists to work together. As is often the case with Franco-American collaborations, the French found the Americans overly practical, too hurried, insufficiently interested in historical accuracy, and unwilling to trust the intuitive knowledge gained from vast artisanal experience. The Americans, meanwhile, considered their French counterparts too enamored of abstract theories and too divorced from the day-to-day considerations of moving the project along. These differences eventually scuttled the original restoration plan in which the French were to oversee the diagnostic and design work, and the Americans the actual restoration project. When relations between the two groups broke down, the U.S. architects and engineers took control of the project and demoted the French from full partners to consultants.
Another reason for the change of leadership turned on the Franco-American Committee’s inability to raise much money. It had to compete with the high-powered Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, a private, not-for-profit fund-raising corporation created alongside the public Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission, established by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to advise the National Park Service on the restoration of the two historic sites. Reagan had appointed Lee Iacocca, the former head of Chrysler, to run the commission, and Iacocca simultaneously served as the foundation’s chair. The former auto executive proved an excellent fund-raiser, and the more successful his efforts became, the more control his group wanted over the restoration processes. Eventually, the French withdrew from the restoration effort, which by mid-1984 had become a largely American affair.
Iacocca claimed he would raise funds for the restoration in the same spirit as Pulitzer had shown in championing the pedestal project a century earlier. The newspaperman considered “the dollar of the hard-working mechanic, the railroad laborer or the shop-girl [a] more noble gift, representing more self-sacrifice, than $10,000 would be from any of our millionaires.”1 Iacocca said much the same thing (allowing for inflation): “We should get the school kids, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts involved. Each guy sending in five or ten bucks is better than ten corporations sending in a million-each.”2 More than twenty million people, including a great many school-children, did indeed contribute to the restoration. Many included letters with their checks, and a large number addressed their letters to the statue herself. People recalled their awe or joy in seeing Liberty for the first time, and they wrote about the oppression and hardship, including at Ellis Island, they and their families had suffered before entering the United States. “I first saw you on the evening of May 4, 1909,” wrote Olaf Holen, “from the deck of the Immigrant Ship that brought me from Norway. I was wondering . . . ‘What is going to happen to me?’ . . . But you gave me courage.” Another donor remembered, “[You] were a beautiful sight after a miserable crossing that September,” and still another recalled, “A boy was screaming with joy, ‘Wake up, wake up, you can see the Statue of Liberty. You can see the Statue of Liberty.’”3
Immigrants retained vivid memories of their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty because of the difficult conditions they had escaped. “In 1910,” wrote Bluma Clara Fietz, “I came with my mother and two brothers . . . I lived through the 1905 massacre in Odessa . . . and still remember the horror of those days as if it was yesterday.” Another Russian immigrant recalled attacks by Cossacks, “pilfering, killing, raping. We would hide in cellars, but it was no escaping them . . . My sister, 19 . . . said she would die rather than submit to rape.” A man of Greek origins told of fleeing Ataturk’s “bloodthirsty troops,” who “set the city of Smyrna afire and then they started butchering everyone. . . . You Americans can never know how we . . . felt when we, in the early hours of a very cold January morning, saw you, the Statue of Liberty.” Finally, a woman who had spent “many years in concentration camp by Hitler” told of having given up all hope. “I lost father, mother, 3 sister, and 2 brothers . . . Was agony, hunger, torture . . . Our uncle in the U.S. made affidavit and we arrived in 1948, January. Was a blizzard, and we pointed to that lovely Lady, the Statue of Liberty, the biggest Dream I ever had.”4
Immigrants arriving in New York Harbor.
Although millions of letters arrived, most contained modest sums; the lion’s share of the money to fund Liberty’s restoration came from large corporations, which financed about 90 percent of the project’s $70-million cost. Some donated money outright, but most did so in exchange for permission to affix the centennial’s imprimatur to their products, to call their beverage or car or umbrella (“Every time it rains, you’ll remember her 100th birthday”) the “official” one of Liberty’s centennial. Other companies negotiated arrangements in which every time a consumer used or purchased their product, Iacocca’s foundation received a tiny percentage. The best-known such tie-in was American Express’s agreement to donate one penny to the restoration for each use of its credit card during the last quarter of 1983. This arrangement netted $1.7 million for the foundation; it also increased purchases with the card by 30 percent during this period. It was a good deal all around, but especially for American Express, a company just beginning to take advantage of what Madison Avenue called “cause-related marketing.”5
Iacocca took a great deal of criticism for what some called the “commercialization of the Statue of Liberty,” but his foundation, though liberal in accepting such corporate connections, didn’t accept them all. His executives rejected a proposal by Seagram’s to donate twenty-five cents for each of its whiskeys and wines consumed at designated bars on “official” Statue of Liberty nights. The foundation didn’t want to be accused of fostering public drunkenness, even for such a patriotic cause. It also rejected requests for “official” Statue of Liberty coffins, toilet paper, and many other products deemed inappropriate. Iacocca’s organization doubtless would have said no to the “Statue of Liberty Freedom Classic Thong,” which showed Lady Liberty breaking the chains of sexual inhibition and promised to “cover sweet spots without covering your assets.” Still, the foundation granted official status to more than a thousand items, ranging from T-shirts to tricycles, swizzle sticks to snuff boxes, potato chips to paper napkins. To add to its coffers, Iacocca’s foundation turned scrap metal from the statue’s rejuvenated innards into relics selling for between $10 and $300 apiece. Souvenir hunters, advertisements declared, could “have a piece of the actual lady,” while tinkerers could “Build your own State of Liberty” with a kit selling for $7.95. Anyone could buy replicas large and small, of metal or Styrofoam, priced for every budget. The statue’s image may have been sold almost at will, but, unlike the 1880s, the fund-raising efforts proved an overwhelming success. Iacocca amassed enough money not only to pay for Liberty’s makeover, but to finance a $30-million centennial celebration and, some years later, the restoration of Ellis Island.
Although French architects and engineers had been pushed aside early in the process, it was they who had successfully diagnosed many of the problems that the American architects and engineers would fix. One key issue involved the statue’s head and shoulder, which engineers found to be tilted off-center—the head by about two feet and the torch-bearing shoulder by eighteen inches. As a result, one of the crown spokes touched the arm, and the shoulder was dangerously weak. The torch wasn’t about to come crashing down on its own, but the restoration team decided to prevent it from deteriorating further. As for the torch’s flame, it had to be removed and recreated from scratch. In 1916 Gutzon Borglum, the future sculptor of Mount Rushmore, attempted to light the flame from the inside by cutting 250 openings and installing panes of amber glass, many of them inadequately sealed. Over time, rainwater seeped in, and the flame became badly corroded.
After workmen took the entire torch down, the restoration team faced the question of how to rebuild the flame. Should they model it after the one they now had in their workshop, the flame in the form Borglum had left it, or should they re-create Bartholdi’s original? If the latter, how would they know what it had looked like or exactly how it had been built? Restorers scoured French and American archives for written evidence about the design and production of the original flame but had little success. Fortunately, they did find high-quality close-up photographs of Bartholdi’s monument, and these pictures showed enough detail to convince restoration officials to re-create the Frenchman’s original design. Inevitably, the new version would differ from the old, but who would be able to tell?
While redoing the flame, artisans repaired the torch and arm and completely rebuilt the upper balustrade, a studio replica of which Hitchcock had used for the final terrifying scenes of Saboteur. Although computers helped prepare the designs, the actual work had to be done by hand. The restoration team found a group of twelve French craftsmen skilled in the nineteenth-century techniques of repoussé metalwork, the process of molding thin copper plates by delicately hammering them into shape. These artisans were invited to New York, where they re-created Bartholdi’s flame, including a magnificent gilding job that, later in the process, would finally fulfill the unrealized dream of lighting Liberty’s torch.
Meanwhile, restorers turned to a great many other tasks, the most crucial of which was the repair of the statue’s badly corroded iron skeleton. As French engineers had suspected and Americans then confirmed, without serious structural work the Statue of Liberty would, before long, begin to sag and then lose its distinctive shape. Eventually, it would collapse altogether.
As we’ve seen, the skeleton has three main parts: a central pylon, or tower, that bears most of the weight; a secondary support system that links the tower to the statue’s copper skin via a springlike system that transfers wind pressure from the weak copper envelope to the strong secondary and primary supports; and a grid-work of thin rectangular bars, bent to conform to the folds of the skin, that brace it from the inside and maintain its shape. The first and second parts of the skeleton had remained largely intact, but the third part, the armature of narrow iron bars, required urgent attention.
Eiffel had attached the iron bars to the inside of the skin by wrapping U-shaped copper straps around them and riveting the straps to the bars and the skin at both ends of the U. This ingenious method of attachment allowed for some give inside the U (called a “saddle”); it allowed, that is, for the skin and iron braces to move independently of each other as changing temperatures made them expand and contract. This system enhanced the structure’s flexibility and prevented the skeleton from damaging the skin as each responded differently to temperature change. The problem, as Eiffel understood, is that when copper and iron touch, they produce a chemical reaction that corrodes the iron, causing it to lose strength. Eiffel tried to prevent the reaction by inserting a layer of asbestos between the two metals. But asbestos doesn’t last forever, and as it gradually wore thin, the iron corroded. The French engineer’s efforts thus created two problems instead of one: damaged metal and remnants of asbestos, a highly carcinogenic material.
Since corrosion makes iron swell, the damaged iron bars expanded into the space between them and the copper saddles, creating new points of corrosive contact between the two metals and eliminating the give between them. This process further weakened the iron, while exerting pressure on the saddles and the skin and eventually on the rivets that held them together. Thousands of rivets popped out of the structure, creating holes where they once had been inserted. It was as if some malign force had perforated the Statue of Liberty with a huge ice pick. Now, rainwater dripped inexorably in, and the flow of moisture accelerated the corrosion process, ensuring a vicious cycle of auto-destruction. Saddles came lose, iron bars weakened, rivets popped out or sheared off, and pressure built against the skin instead of being transferred to the skeleton’s strong inner core. In time, the monument would have sagged, and sections of its copper skin would have turned into a great many hanging chads.
Another major issue concerned access to the monument and the staircase inside. Bartholdi had not planned on having visitors enter the statue and climb to the top. As a result, he had allowed for only a makeshift entrance, a roughly finished interior, and just a narrow wooden staircase for maintenance workers toiling inside. Nevertheless, from the day the statue opened, people wanted to explore its innards and look at New York Harbor from its crown. After Liberty became a national monument in 1924 the federal government made various stopgap improvements to its interior, but by 1984 the staircase had deteriorated badly and needed to be replaced.
Beyond these structural problems were the indignities that Liberty had long suffered in silence: graffiti on the underside—and even the surface—of her skin; birds’ nests hidden in its folds; ugly stains on her robes; and bird droppings encrusted everywhere. Although the statue looked intact when viewed from afar, close-up inspection revealed a variety of blemishes—cracks in the right eye, lips, and chin; a damaged nostril; missing hair; and foot chains completely detached from the structure. Bartholdi had deemphasized the symbols of bondage when he turned his original sketches into a fully realized model; a century later, Liberty’s trampled foot chains had become prominent once again.
Throughout the long process of analyzing the statue’s damages and deficiencies, the engineers and architects involved always had to be mindful of what it means to restore a historical structure. They constantly asked themselves whether, and to what extent, Bartholdi and Eiffel’s original design, methods, and materials should be reproduced. Was the goal merely to repair the ravages of time and the elements, while changing as little as possible? Or was it to create an updated Statue of Liberty, one whose structure and form would benefit from modern knowledge, technology, and techniques? To their credit, members of the restoration team addressed these questions by doing a huge amount of historical research. But in many cases they found it impossible to uncover Bartholdi and Eiffel’s original conceptions and methods. And when they did succeed in discovering them, they sometimes found that the original statue, as constructed, departed in significant ways from one or both men’s intentions. For example, Eiffel seems to have planned to brace the torch-bearing shoulder properly from an engineering point of view. But during construction in Paris, Bartholdi apparently changed those plans, weakening the structure and tilting the torch too close to the head, which itself was tilted and inadequately braced to the main pylon that held up the whole monument. The restoration team ardently debated whether to revert to Eiffel’s design or to maintain the structure as built. The first would have automatically produced a stronger shoulder, but what if Bartholdi had had artistic reasons for altering Eiffel’s design? In that case, shouldn’t the restoration respect the artist’s realization rather than the engineer’s plans—even at the cost of complicating the structural problem at hand? Questions such as these were far from easy to sort out, especially under the pressure of finishing the project in time for the centennial celebration on the Fourth of July weekend 1986.
As restoration team members waded through these questions, they needed to get the work under way. The first task was to build elaborate scaffolding to encase the statue, scaffolding that would allow workmen to do their jobs while keeping the monument from being scratched, chipped, or dented in the strong New York Harbor winds. Bartholdi had erected the Statue of Liberty without the benefit of a scaffold, precisely because of those winds. The restoration thus needed unusually stable scaffolding that could pass the most arduous of weather tests. In September 1985, just such a test occurred when Hurricane Gloria swept through the harbor. The storm packed gale winds of seventy-three miles per hour, which buffeted the statue and its scaffolding for hours. Liberty came through unscathed.
Fortunately only a single hurricane hit during the restoration process, but workmen had to contend regularly with the rain. The constant moisture required scaffolding built of aluminum, not, as usual, of steel. The inevitable rust from the ferrous metal would have dripped onto the statue, potentially discoloring it for good. This special, custom-made scaffolding took four months to erect and cost $2 million. It was a dangerous, difficult job made more arduous by the harsh winter of 1985, though teams of builders found motivation in a competition to be the first to kiss Liberty on the lips.
When complete, the scaffolding soared three hundred feet above Liberty Island and shrouded the green goddess in a silver metal glow. Workers reported that as the winds blew through the aluminum structure it chimed, as if singing to them. The view from the top was so spectacular that restoration leaders considered building an outside elevator in which tourists could ascend to the summit of the scaffolding and observe the restoration close-up. When an elevator appeared perilous and impractical, they consulted a Ferris wheel company to see what it could do. In the end, restoration leaders dropped the idea as too dangerous and expensive.
The scaffolding enabled restoration leaders to inspect the statue’s surface closely and to inventory the damage it had endured, damage that was far from trivial. But they also gained new respect for copper’s ability to shield itself. Liberty’s coating had remained in relatively good shape thanks to the process of patination, in which red copper turns green when exposed to moisture and air. The green patina provides a thin protective layer that keeps the metal from corroding and enables it to endure. When first erected in Paris, the statue displayed a red-brown hue, not unlike a newly minted penny. It had turned fully brown by the time of its inauguration in October 1886, and Bartholdi thought it would settle into a bronze color and look like the classical statues that had inspired him. But of course Liberty evolved naturally into the green hue we know, and the restorers took great pains to leave that patina intact.
Still, some nasty stains had to be removed—not only the ones from bird droppings, but from coal tar, incinerator smoke, and paint. Black tar designed to protect the underside of the skin had seeped through the seams of the copper plates and onto the outside of the statue. Part of Liberty’s back had turned black from exposure to the island’s trash incinerator, and dark paint had splashed from the torch balcony onto the statue’s arm. After considering several chemical cleaners, restoration experts decided to bathe the structure with a powerful pressure-wash. That took care of most of the problems, but the cleaning effort itself caused new ones. Parts of the statue turned blue when an abrasive powder used to clean the underside of the skin leaked through the seams and mixed with rainwater. The resulting chemical reaction produced bright blue crystals of sodium bicarbonate that threatened to dissolve entire sections of the statue’s green patina and give it blue polka dots. The monument had to undergo another intense power wash.
The bright aluminum scaffolding gave the external work drama and visibility, but what went on inside proved far more important. That work would enable the statue to last long enough to celebrate its bicentennial in 2086. To shore up the envelope of copper that gave Liberty her form required the replacement of its entire tertiary structure. That meant removing and then duplicating, one by one, all 1,825 individually shaped iron bars, 325 springs, 2,000 saddles (copper attachment straps), and 12,000 rivets. To prevent the copper skin from being damaged or distorted, this massive job had to be done one small section at a time, each in twenty-five painstaking steps. But to keep to the planned completion schedule, work had to proceed uninterrupted, twenty-four hours a day, such that no part of the monument remained unbraced for more than a day and a half. At maximum speed, workers could replace 70 of the 1,825 bars each week.
Although some preservationists wanted to make the new skin support system an exact copy of the old, restoration leaders rejected the idea on grounds that the original system had failed to last even a hundred years. They decided to replace the rusting iron bars with replicas made of stainless steel 316L, a strong metal that resists corrosion. To attempt to ward off corrosion altogether, workmen coated the stainless steel bars with Teflon tape backed with pressure-sensitive silicone. The new saddles, like the old, were made of copper, and each rivet had to be “prepatinized” to prevent the restored statue from being pocked for years with red copper dots. This intricate work had to be done mainly by hand, which required a large number of highly skilled craftsmen.
Laboring on the inside involved fewer dangers and less discomfort than on the outside, with one exception: removing the asbestos. Those assigned that task had to don “spacesuits” to protect them from inhaling particles of the old insulation. During this stage of the process the Statue of Liberty looked more like an orbiting space station than a venerable American monument. The asbestos removal necessarily proceeded slowly and deliberately, and for that reason added considerably to the restoration’s already soaring costs. To offset them, Iacocca’s organization decided to sell Liberty’s corroded old iron bars as souvenirs.
With the skin support system redone, the inner structural work neared its end. The principal remaining task was to shore up Liberty’s rickety right shoulder. Engineers wanted to replace the shoulder by adapting Eiffel’s original engineering design but found themselves overruled by the strict preservationists on the restoration team. The latter resolved to maintain Bartholdi’s tilted torch, albeit strengthened by modern building techniques. Once the shoulder had been reinforced, restorers completed the interior work by strengthening the statue’s ties to its pedestal, repairing minor damage to the girders, fixing the supports for Liberty’s head, and blasting away layers of lead-based paint and the old coal tar used for waterproofing Liberty’s insides. As we’ve seen, workers sprayed the tar with sodium bicarbonate, the main ingredient of Alka-Seltzer. The bright blue crystals that leaked through to the statue’s surface must have created a fair amount of indigestion among those who saw it close up. As for the leaden paint, it succumbed to icy blasts of liquid nitrogen, a substance that clocks in at −320 degrees Fahrenheit and makes petrified paint fall to the ground.
With the statue’s interior cleaned and strengthened, the restoration team now made it more accessible to tourists, who would enter the structure through two huge wooden doors, a grand new opening designed to acknowledge the public’s long-held desire to go inside. For those content to climb only to the top of the pedestal, a new glass-walled elevator would enable them to do so without burning a single extra calorie. En route they could look out and up to glimpse Eiffel’s elegant interior design. For tourists who wanted to experience the Statue of Liberty as a whole, the restoration team decided to build a new dual metal stairway, one side for the ascent and one for the return trip down. Once the project was complete, it would be easier to climb to the crown, although not that easy. It was still a matter of 354 steps, or twenty-two stories, and, to make room for two staircases, each had to be winding and narrow, with steps only a few inches across.
At the top, inside the crown, those who had braved the climb would no longer have to peer out through clouded, dirty portholes. The restoration installed clear, pristine windows, cleanable from the inside. The summit would be a prime romantic spot were it not for the Park Service rangers permanently installed there as guides and chaperones. Still, when VIP guests have been allowed up on their own, security cameras have captured plenty of intimate moments.6 For visitors falling ill or who are prone to acrophobia (fear of heights) or bathmophobia (fear of stairs), restoration workers installed a tiny emergency elevator to enable Park Service rangers to ascend quickly all the way to Liberty’s neck and then spirit people out. Previously rangers had to evacuate the stairway, climb up to the affected person, and use a hammocklike stretcher slung over the bannister to lower the individual to the ground. This seems hardly the best way to minister to tourists overcome by a fear of heights.
The restoration’s final touch was to light the Statue of Liberty as she’d never been lit before. Preservationists knew that Bartholdi had intended his statue to be a figurative beacon of liberty, not an actual lighthouse for boats. Still, it has always seemed to Americans that the monument should be lit, even if its illumination had long proved impossible to achieve. In 1986, thanks to new technology and the ingenious placement of lighting pits on Liberty Island and projectors on the torch balcony, the statue was at long last properly lit. The new techniques appeared to set the gilded flame afire while bathing the statue as a whole in an inspired crescendo of light. Liberty glows softly at her base, brighter at the hem of her robe, and still brighter at her shoulders and neck. Her illumination draws the eye ever upward until we fix our gaze on the fiery crown and torch. The Statue of Liberty has become the beacon it was destined to be.