October 28, 1886: The Statue of Liberty Is Dedicated

October 28, 1886: The Statue of Liberty is dedicated in New York Harbor, on Bedloe's Island, soon to be renamed Liberty Island. As the men who officially dedicated it dock at The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan afterward, and walk back up to City Hall, men working in the buildings overlooking Broadway throw tape from stock tickers out the window, thus spontaneously inventing the ticker-tape parade.

It was intended as a gift from France to America on the 100th Anniversary of independence, in 1876. Unfortunately, while the French government was willing to supply the materials, the Americans would have to pay for their shipping across the Atlantic Ocean, and for their assembly. It took 10 years to raise enough money to do that.

The designer was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, age 52 when the statue was dedicated. It's been said that Lady Liberty's face was that of Bartholdi's mother, while her body was that of his mistress. He lived until 1904.

His actual name for the statue was La Liberté éclairant le monde: Liberty Enlightening the World, hence her right arm raised, holding a torch. In her left arm is a tablet, inscribed with JULY IV MDCCLXXVI -- the date on the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. Under her sandaled feet are broken chains, symbolizing the abolition of slavery. France had abolished slavery in its African colonies in 1848, 17 years before America did so on her own shores.

The Statue became a symbol of hope to immigrants once the immigration station opened at adjacent Ellis Island in 1892. In 1903, a bronze plaque was mounted inside the pedestal's lower level, inscribed with the text of a poem written by Emma Lazarus, in 1883 in preparation for the statue: "The New Colossus." Comparing Lady Liberty to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the long-gone Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Lazarus wrote:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Previously, America had been symbolized in feminine form by a generic woman named "Columbia," for Christopher Columbus. In time, Lady Liberty would become America's feminine form, the way Uncle Sam became its masculine form.

The Statue's outer shell is made of copper, so she started out a deep brown, which may have pissed off some white supremacists. Over time, however, as copper does, she turned a light green.

From those sandaled feet to the tip of her torch, Lady Liberty stands 151 feet, 1 inch high. From the bottom of the pedestal on the island to the tip of the torch, 305 feet, 1 inch.

Visitors can take a ferry from Lower Manhattan to Liberty Island, and ride to her crown, and look out over New York Harbor and the City. Access to the torch has been disallowed since 1916, when the Statue took shrapnel from the Black Tom Explosion in nearby Jersey City, New Jersey.

And while Liberty Island and adjacent Ellis Island are closer to New Jersey than to any part of the State of New York, officially, they are in the State of New York.

In 1984, a massive renovation project began. For nearly 2 full years, the Statue was covered by scaffolding. On July 4, 1986, the Statue was rededicated with a massive fireworks display.

Many movies use the Statue as an establishing shot to show that they're set in New York. Sometimes, this backfires: The 1st and 3rd Superman movies with Christopher Reeve appear to show the State of Liberty -- and also the original World Trade Center and the Empire State Building -- as being in Superman's fictional hometown of Metropolis.

And when movies want to suggest that disaster has struck New York, they use the Statue, either damaged (its head clawed off by the Cloverfield monster) or as part of a ruin (in the twist ending of the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes).

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October 28, 1886 was a Thursday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. Hockey was still all-amateur. And basketball hadn't been invented yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.