Recently I’ve been thinking about the color of the Statue of Liberty. That elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green got into my head last year when I was standing on the roof of an apartment building in the Bronx. Edwin Velasquez, a young man who works for Bronx Pro Group, a developer of affordable housing, was showing me a roof painting he had superintended. The job was a minor triumph of his. A designer had given him a plan on paper and he had successfully transposed it to the fifteen-thousand-square-foot roof. Now the heat-reflecting paint would help cool the building in summer, and the design’s images stood out in satellite photos of the city seen from above. We strolled around on the painting, examining it. The next phase would be to continue the painting onto the roof of the building across the street. “That building is ours, and so is that one, and that,” he said, pointing up and down Andrews Avenue South. “You can always tell Bronx Pro buildings because we paint our fire escapes and window trim Statue of Liberty green.”
Sometimes the right words can transform your eyes. When I heard the name of the color, the fire escapes popped into focus for the first time. Forty years ago, when I lived in a loft on Canal Street, my fire escape was a faded red, as were many fire escapes, as many still are. Now I saw how the contrasting Statue of Liberty green trim set off the brown or clay-yellow brickwork of the buildings, making them appear elegantly turned out, as if for review in an apartment-building parade. Later, as Velasquez and I walked through Morris Heights, I noticed a lot of buildings with fire escapes of that particular green, or variations on it.
Velasquez’s boss, Peter Magistro, chose the color for his company’s signature trim fifteen or twenty years ago. He doesn’t remember where he got the sample. He ordered the paint from New Palace Paint Supply, on East 180th Street, which also sells paint in bulk to the Department of Transportation, the Parks Department, and the New York City Housing Authority. When I made a visit to the store one afternoon, I saw that its own window trim is Statue of Liberty green. Joseph R. Ascatigno, the son of the owner, said they call the color Home Builders Green, for the name of Magistro’s general-contracting company. “People love the color,” Ascatigno told me. “We’ve had people walk in here and see our trim and say, ‘I want that color.’ ”
New Palace sells mostly Benjamin Moore paint, which had no factory-made color to match Magistro’s sample, so the eye of the store’s spectrophotometer read the sample, found a mixture of colors to duplicate it, and gave a formula. The formula was typed on the paint-spattered keyboard of a Gennex Fluid Management tinter, which then squirted the constituent colors—school-bus yellow, dark green, and black—into a can of oil-based white paint. Another machine shook the can to mix them. From there the new color began to spread across the Bronx.
The Statue of Liberty’s exterior is made of copper, and it turned that shade of green because of oxidation. Copper is a noble metal, which means that it does not react readily with other substances. The Statue’s copper is only three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick and unusually pure. A copper magnate named Pierre-Eugène Secrétan donated most of it—the sculpture required about a hundred tons. Secrétan probably took it from a mine in which he held an interest on an island off the coast of Norway. Later, he was ruined in the copper crash of 1889.
At the Statue’s unveiling, in 1886, it was brown, like a penny. By 1906, oxidation had covered it with a green patina. The thin layer of oxidation that covers copper (and bronze, an alloy made mostly of copper) can preserve the metal for centuries, even millennia, as shown by objects from the ancient world. A monumental bronze statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, which portrayed Helios, the sun god, provided Auguste Bartholdi with the inspiration for the Statue. The Rhodes Colossus stood for about fifty-six years, until 226 B.C., when it broke off at the knees and collapsed in an earthquake. By then, it probably was a shade of blackish-green. Neither bronze nor copper rusts. Pieces of the Colossus lay for nine hundred years where they had fallen, until the seventh century, when they were sold for scrap.
As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do. The Army was in charge of the Statue then, because it had been erected on Bedloe’s Island, which was an active military base. In 1906, New York newspapers printed stories saying that the Statue was soon to be painted. The public did not like the idea. The officer in charge of the base, Captain George C. Burnell, told the Times, “I wish the newspapers had never mentioned that. I am in receipt of bushels of letters on the subject, and most of them protest vigorously against the proposed plan. I can’t say now just what we will do, but we will have to do something.”
The Times reporter then went to the country’s largest bronze and copper manufacturer, on West Twenty-sixth Street, and asked if the Statue should be painted. The company V.P. said that painting it would be vandalism, and completely unnecessary because of the protective quality of the patina. The executive went on:
The Statue’s exterior was not painted in 1906, nor has it ever been. Despite several rehabilitations and restorations inside and out, and other threats of painting over or polishing off the patina, the Statue has been left its own, irreproducible color.
I made trips to the Statue to check it out in person. The first time, I took the ferry from lower Manhattan on a cloudy, drizzly day. As the boat got closer, the Statue loomed; there is nothing as tall anywhere around it, and when it came into full view it seemed almost to lunge out of the water. All the colors in its surroundings collaborated with the Statue’s own green: the bruise-blue of the clouds, the faded green of the leaves of the island’s London plane trees, the crayon green of the lawn, the forest-green seaweed on the rocks, the jade green of the waves.
When I went back a week later, I came by ferry from Liberty State Park, in New Jersey. This time, the sky was clear and the sun shone full on the Statue from directly overhead and its color blew me away. It kind of effervesced. I could not look at it enough. It did not resemble the swatch of Home Builders Green from New Palace Paint Supply that I had brought with me. I held the swatch up for comparison. The paint was shiny, tight, flat, while the ageless patina of the copper had a texture like extremely fine velour. Some of it shaded to a green-black, parts were dark blue, parts olive. Some of the green had evidently washed down onto the pedestal and stained the bas-relief granite shields once intended to hold the seals of the thirty-eight states (plus two extra for the future) that had entered the Union by 1886.
On the walkway that goes around the Statue I went clockwise and then counter-, to see how she looks from the south, the side immigrants saw first, with the right knee bent and the figure in stride. Then I stopped to view her from the front, the way the immigrants saw her as their ships passed by. From that angle she appears to be standing immobile. I did not leave until late in the afternoon, when the sun had moved lower in the sky. Now, as I watched from the ferry, light streamed around her. She was a giant silhouette with all of America behind her.
John Robbins, the historical architect who was a leader of the crew that restored the Statue between 1984 and 1986, and who now is in charge of construction, personnel, and security at the National Gallery, told me by phone that different degrees of patination cause the dark patches that people have noticed on her, especially on her face. Weather hammers her, too. “The wind up and down the Hudson River—down from Canada, up from the Atlantic Ocean—is quite severe,” he said. “The moist air has salt, and pollutants like acid rain and dissolved gases, and very tiny abrasives like the pieces of rubber from the tires of the city’s millions of cars. Not to mention the snow and hail and hurricanes. She’s an amazing artifact to have stood it all so well for so long.”
His team of restorers washed bird streaks and tar from the outside, removed bird’s nests from the base of the arm, replaced pieces of the nose, and redid the torch. Robbins said that the French artisans who made the torch were rumored to have saved buckets of their urine to patinate it, Gallic pee being thought the best for that task. If they did, it appeared to have had no effect, he added.
And what about the color? Why does it beguile us, and why did people become so devoted to it, early on, that they defended it from the Army’s customary practice of painting anything that doesn’t move?
“The object, all hundred and fifty feet of it, is handmade,” Robbins said. “The repoussé technique, hammering the copper on the molds that shaped it, was done by hand and square inch by square inch. Even in places nobody can see, the sculpture isn’t blank, it’s richly detailed—the strands of hair on the top of her head, the bun, the soles of her sandals. By her feet, the broken shackles, which are concealed from viewers on the ground, could be stand-alone works of art. The patina is an organic part of its handmade quality. Patina is a crystalline structure; it’s not opaque like paint. You’re looking into it. The copper, which is quite pure, is almost all still the original, after all this time. The patina has been growing for a hundred and thirty years.”
On September 29, 1909, Wilbur Wright took off from Governors Island in his canvas biplane, flew to the Statue of Liberty, and circled it while hundreds of thousands of spectators in boats and along the shore looked on. He then returned to Governors Island, after less than five minutes in the air. No American had ever flown in a plane over water before. The feat provided a highlight for the city’s Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, which commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s landing on Manhattan Island and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first successful steamboat trial.
The Hudson-Fulton Celebration had a special flag, with orange, blue, and white horizontal stripes, and the letters “HF” in the middle. New York City itself lacked a colorful flag at the time. All it had was a plain white banner with the city’s seal in blue in the center. In 1915, the Art Commission associates of the City of New York created a new flag, also using orange, blue, and white. Like the designers of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration flag, the associates chose the colors because they were the flag of the Netherlands when the city was founded, in 1626. For a change, the associates arranged the stripes vertically rather than horizontally, with the blue closest to the flagpole, the white in the middle, and the orange next.
The flag the associates designed has now been flying over New York for a hundred and one years. Its orange, white, and blue became the city’s official visual signature. Sometimes the Empire State Building is lit up with these colors in honor of sporting events or anniversaries in local history. Orange, white, and blue are the colors of the New York baseball Mets and basketball Knicks, and of the hockey Islanders, in from the suburbs. The blue, which is almost indigo, makes the orange jump out at you, and vice versa, while the white assists them both. As colors go, these could not be louder, and in combination they shout.
The colors of the city flag imply history, politics, religion, and civic weal. The Statue of Liberty, by contrast, has a kinship with the color of money. Its outward and visible part almost is money, to the extent that pennies still have value today. The Statue is always described as the gift of the French people to the people of the United States, because the French raised the money to pay for the sculpture by their private donations, and their government was not involved. The American people eventually responded by raising money for the Statue’s pedestal. Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World, led a fund-raising campaign in his newspaper, and it succeeded spectacularly, producing a hundred and two thousand dollars in donations between March and August of 1885. Pulitzer said that he would publish the name of every donor, no matter the amount donated. Names in small type, all jammed together, took up page after page in the paper. Sometimes the donations were only a few cents. The Statue owes its existence to French and American spare change.
Nothing shakes money loose like the Statue. Advertisements employing the Statue have been around since before she stood in the harbor. People in Statue of Liberty costumes often work the city’s sidewalks. Liberty Tax Service, the national tax-return preparers, sends temps in Statue costumes to pass out handbills every April; you come upon these Statues leafletting and smoking cigarettes at choke points around town. Year round, in Times Square and by the ferry dock in Battery Park, tall Statue impersonators, with their robes and torches and crowns, pose for tourists and accept gratuities while networks of tiny cracks appear in their pale-green face paint. The stuff is waxy and pasty, the color of a hospital wall.
If immigrants who came by ship had heard that the streets of America were paved with gold, seeing a huge copper statue in the harbor when they arrived probably seemed about right. Copper is not as imperishable as gold, but it’s more demotic, a people’s metal. Why would a democracy need streets of gold? Copper, like the penny, is for everybody, and probably just as good for paving.
The Art Commission of the City of New York, which created the city’s flag, still exists, but under a different name. Now it is called the Public Design Commission, or P.D.C. Established by city charter, the commission oversees the design aspects of structures, parks, streetscapes, and works of art on and over city property. The P.D.C.’s dozen members, appointed to the job and serving on a volunteer basis, come from the executive staffs of the city’s libraries and museums, or are independent artists. Their decisions control much of the over-all look of the city. During the Bloomberg administration, for example, the P.D.C. recommended against using crazy colors on infrastructure. As an older city, New York should stay more temperate and dignified, the commissioners said. The P.D.C. is why we don’t have flame-yellow bridge supports in New York.
Byron Kim, a painter with a studio in Brooklyn, served on the P.D.C. from 2003 to 2014. He remembers the colors that the Department of Transportation was using on bridges and other structures when he started out. “There were only four colors, and they were all pretty bad,” he said. “We had to negotiate with the Department of Transportation, and a lot of their considerations were budgetary, or based on how much of the old paint they had in storage. We came up with some new colors—George Washington Bridge Gray, the traditional color of the G.W.B., which is a subtle silver-gray that everybody loved, and Deep Cool Red, a richer, more saturated red, and Federal Blue, which is a strong blue (I had a lot to do with our choosing it), and Green Aluminum. That color, and Sage Green, an older Parks Department color, may be the ones you’re seeing that remind you of the Statue.”
Kim’s most famous work, “Synecdoche,” consists of more than four hundred painted squares depicting the various skin colors of strangers and of his friends, family members, and acquaintances. I asked him if he saw any connection between that work and the color of the Statue. “Human skin colors are hard to pin down and they have a lot of emotional connotations,” he said. “As I looked at them and tried to reproduce them with paint, they were never simple. Skin is not any single color, even on one person. We assume we know what color certain things are. Everybody knows the sky is blue. But the sky is different from one part to another; it’s hard to describe. Think of all the ideas that have been in people’s heads when they looked at the Statue of Liberty. What color could stand for those ideas? What color is freedom?”
I liked his sky analogy, because the Statue belongs as much to the sky as to the land. That’s why Wilbur Wright flew around her, and why a solar-powered airplane on a globe-spanning journey did a flyby over her a few months ago. If the Statue were any identifiable human skin color, such as white or black or brown, her meaning would be limited. Instead she’s green, the usual color of space aliens.
When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes.
You notice the city’s many parts that are made of copper. In the skyline of downtown, the roofs of the Woolworth Building, the World Financial Center, and 40 Wall Street all stand out copper-green. Decorative borders on the tops of certain apartment buildings, and ornamental sculptures, and gutters on brownstones in older neighborhoods, and moldings of certain skylights and windows, and even a few doors and door frames, come close to duplicating the Statue’s shade. I used to regard the city as something apart from me, like a mountain range. I assumed that the way it looked—not too good, back in the seventies and eighties—was its own doing. Eventually, I understood that every part of it is the result of a decision somebody made. The discovery gave me an unexpected sense of connection and responsibility. Now my eye constantly picks out elevated-train girders, footbridges, drawbridge houses, pipelines, fuel tanks, lampposts, window gratings, fence bars, guardrails, and I-beams holding up interstate overpasses, all in their own versions of Statue of Liberty green, and they fasten me to the city.
In 1906, the Times noted that visitors to the Statue took a “little steamer” that carried forty or fifty passengers and went every hour. Today, the Statue ferries carry hundreds on each trip and leave every half hour from both sides of the Hudson. According to data based on ticket purchases and customer surveys compiled by the ferry company, more than a million people from foreign countries visit the Statue every year, and almost three million Americans. This year, the combined total will be about four and a half million—about four times the number of immigrants who entered through Ellis Island in 1907, its busiest year. The executive staffers who run the Statue think that the sight of her still standing in the harbor after September 11th imprinted her powerfully on people’s minds.
The original point of the Statue was to celebrate the end of slavery after the Civil War and remind the Statue’s country of origin of the lost promise of its own revolution. In time, with Emma Lazarus’s poem welcoming the poor and the tempest-tossed on a plaque at the pedestal, the Statue came to stand for much more. When we think that we have to treat immigrants cruelly in order to survive, we go against a root structure that’s deep within the city and deep within ourselves. New York City’s official colors are orange, blue, and white, but its secret, sustaining color is Statue of Liberty green. ♦
