Big Apple History . Building the Big Apple . A Giant Welcome


	The Statue of Liberty

The day of the Statue of Liberty's dedication dawned rainy and cold. Fog made it difficult to see the top of the giant statue, which cost a total of $650,000 to build. Still, one million people and 300 ships came out for the spectacle on October 28, 1886. There was a twenty-one-gun salute, a speech by President Grover Cleveland, and a grand ball in the evening. The total cost of the celebration was $9,000.

Fast-forward one hundred years: the Fourth of July dawned breezy and warm in 1986. More than two million people and 30,000 boats came out for the statue's 100th anniversary. There were 40,000 fireworks, speeches by two presidents -- American and French -- and 200 Elvis Presley impersonators. Years of needed repairs to the statue cost $265 million and the celebration alone came with a $30 million bill, nearly 50 times what the original statue had cost.

The Statue of Liberty's history shows that everything about the Statue is big. From Lady Liberty's toe to her torch measures 151 feet. Her hands are 150 square feet each, the size of an average bedroom. At eight feet, the index finger is the length of a surfboard, and each fingernail is the size of a sheet of paper. Altogether, the statue weighs 225 tons -- equal to 5,000 junior-high-school students, more or less.

Illustration: Courtesy of the Collection of the New-York Historical Society.