At some point I plan to redesign Old Spirituals to make it more beautiful and easier to navigate. If you have any suggestions about the layout, please add them in the comments!  I have some ideas for the design but I haven’t put them together yet. When I have something, I’ll definitely be asking for your opinions.  All this to say, I was looking at copper designs and how copper that’s exposed to the elements oxidizes and develops a green patina–like the Statue of Liberty.

Even today, most Americans know the Statue of Liberty is a beautiful gift from the French people. She arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885.  She’s made of copper 3/32 inches thick, which is the equivalent of holding two pennies together. No one alive today has ever seen our statue in any color but her distinctive green.

It seems like it should be a Prismacolor name like Muted Turquoise or Dahlia Purple. Lady Liberty Green.

Our beautiful statue on her pedestal is 305 feet tall. She was designed by sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, and her metal framework was built by none other than Gustave Eiffel. I wrote a post about her construction in 2020 that has some neat pictures.

The Statue of Liberty is pretty sturdy. The statue itself is 250,000 lbs of steel and 62,000 lbs of copper. She was brought to New York from France in pieces that took four months to assemble and mount on her pedestal. The pedestal weighs 27,000 tons.

Because of her height and material, the statue is struck by lightning approximately 600 times a year. That’s even more than the luckless Lillian Hawkins, for those of you who read her story.

Here is what the statue looked like when she first arrived on American shores.

Do you like the statue’s original reddish-brown color or her iconic green? According to reports, neither Bartholdi nor Eiffel anticipated her color would change! This image floats on the Internet so I’m not confident that it’s right, but it is true that within 30 years of living in the New York Harbor, the statue had assumed her current shade of green.

 

The Statue, including the torch, was accessible until July 30, 1916, when an explosion on Black Tom Pier caused flying debris to damage the Statue’s arm and torch. Visitors can climb the steps to view the Harbor from the statue’s crown, but only employees can go into the torch now.

Nevertheless, you can check out the view anytime from the torch. or see the view from the crown without climbing the 27 flights of stairs.  The statue’s live cams are accessible anytime on Earthcam.

I had never heard of the explosion that damaged the statue but it was connected to the Great War, and seemed to have been an act of sabotage. It caused heavy damage on Ellis Island.

 

There are many beautiful images of lightning touching the statue, but this one, by photographer Dan Martland, stands on its own. He captured this image in 2024: