Liberty Island
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How it came to be
In June 1871 the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic and chose Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor as the site, since every ship entering the port had to pass it and the island belonged to the federal government. In September 1875 the historian Édouard de Laboulaye announced the project and founded the Franco-American Union to raise funds. The people of France would pay for the statue, and Americans for the pedestal.
Viollet-le-Duc, who was to engineer the statue, fell ill and died in 1879, and from the following year Gustave Eiffel designed an iron truss tower to carry the copper skin. The finished statue was presented to the American envoy Levi P. Morton in Paris on 4 July 1884. It was then taken apart and shipped on the French steamer Isère, which reached New York on 17 June 1885.
Raising money for the pedestal proved hard until Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, ran a drive that by 11 August 1885 had collected $102,000 from 120,000 donors. Richard Morris Hunt's pedestal was finished in April 1886, and the statue was dedicated on 28 October 1886 with President Grover Cleveland presiding. The island was renamed Liberty Island in 1956, and the statue was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1984.
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