The Express
In 1877, New Yorkers paid fifty cents to climb inside a 42-foot copper arm in Madison Square Park.
The rest of the statue was in France, and the city had to pay for a pedestal it didn’t seem to want.
The Times laughed. Then word came that Boston wanted her.
A Piece of a Statue
For fifty cents in 1877, you could climb a ladder inside a copper arm in Madison Square Park and step out onto a balcony beside its torch. The arm was 42 feet long. The rest of the woman was in France, most of her not yet made.1
She was Liberty Enlightening the World, and the bargain behind her was simple. French donors would pay for the statue and send it over. Americans would supply a site and build the pedestal. Her sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, had already chosen the site: Bedloe’s Island, at the entrance to New York Harbor.2,3
What Bartholdi had not found in America was financial support. A visit in 1871 had won him encouragement but few commitments.3 He had hoped to present the finished statue on July 4, 1876, in time for the nation’s centennial.4 That date came and went with most of her still unbuilt, so he tried showing people a piece of his creation instead. The finished arm and torch went first to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where visitors climbed it and bought photographs.5 After the fair closed, the arm moved to the northern end of Madison Square Park.6,7
The New York Times was not impressed. “They have not been able to procure a whole statue,” it remarked in February 1877, “but they have ornamented the city with a nice large piece of the intended statue’s arm.”1 A piece of a statue, the paper allowed, “is better than no statue whatever,” and it suggested the city might as well scatter the rest of her around town. There was hardly a public statue in New York, it added, that would not be improved by being divided up and distributed.1,6
It’s easy to wince at that now. But nobody in 1877 realized they were looking at a piece of what would become one of the most famous monuments in the world. They were looking at a very large arm belonging to a very uncertain project.
Video: AI reconstruction. People and scenes are dramatized from the historical record.
Blow on the Fire
The man expected to make it less uncertain was Richard Butler, a rubber manufacturer and art collector. He was secretary of the American Committee, formed that January to raise the pedestal money, and Bartholdi, back in Paris, had given him his power of attorney.2,3,8
Butler organized benefits, worked his wealthy friends and set his New Jersey factory to shipping statuettes to contributors. A dollar purchased a six-inch bronzed replica of Liberty. Five dollars purchased a twelve-inch version.5
It wasn’t nearly enough. The committee asked for $125,000, then had to double its estimate. Elsewhere in the country the statue was written off as “New York’s Lighthouse,” and people saw no reason to pay for it. In New York, the arm in Madison Square Park became part of the scenery. From 1877 to 1881, the fund barely moved.2
Then, in the spring of 1881, the committee’s chairman, William M. Evarts, went to Paris and saw how far the French had come. On May 5 he wrote to Butler. He had been “greatly impressed,” and the statue’s “regular and rapid completion is now assured.”9
Butler had told him, as he left New York, that raising the American share would meet with no difficulty and no delay. Evarts did not doubt it. He wished only to suggest, “with some emphasis, that the moment has arrived for putting this to proof.”9
A year later nothing had been put to proof, and Bartholdi was worried. On May 4, 1882, he wrote from Paris to Georges Glaenzer, a friend in New York who was also Butler’s son-in-law. New York had gone quiet, he complained, and he was hearing nothing. The photographs he had sent should be shown around, sold if necessary, “so that people can see what we are doing.” And Glaenzer should give Butler a message: “blow on the fire.”10
“We will be ready,” Bartholdi went on. “Our statue will be finished in time, and it would be almost an affront to France if the pedestal is not built.” Journalists asked from time to time, and he was doing his best to sidestep them.10
No Third Rate Town
That was the year the arm left. After six years in Madison Square it was taken down and shipped back to Paris to be joined to the rest of her. New York’s one piece of Liberty was gone, and on Bedloe’s Island nothing had been built to receive the remainder.1
What stirred the city was Boston. In October 1882, with Boston reported to be bidding for the statue, the same Times that had laughed at the arm discovered strong feelings on the subject. “This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it,” it announced, “and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us.”5
New York had in fact been looking upon 42 feet of it for six years. Still, the point was made. The city might not be ready to pay for Liberty, but it was not going to watch her go to Boston.
Indignation proved cheaper than masonry. The committee kept on with concerts, auctions and exhibitions; one of them, in 1883, drew a sonnet from Emma Lazarus called “The New Colossus.” By early 1884 the fund had reached $125,000 and the pedestal was under way. The contracts swallowed the money as fast as it arrived.2
On July 4, 1884, in Paris, the finished statue was formally presented to the American minister. France had kept its side of the bargain. In New York the following March, the committee’s treasurer reported that $182,000 had been subscribed and all but $3,000 of it spent. Without another $100,000, he said, the pedestal would have to be abandoned, and the gift could not be accepted.2
Give Something, However Little
Joseph Pulitzer had tried to help once already. The Hungarian-born publisher bought the New York World in 1883 and took up the pedestal fund almost at once, to little effect. Two years on, the World had made itself the paper of ordinary New Yorkers, and on March 16, 1885, it tried again.3,11
“We must raise the money!” The statue, the paper argued, had been paid for by “the masses of the French people,” its working men, tradesmen, shop girls and artisans. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give us this money. It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.” The World would print the name of every giver. “Give something, however little.”11
The names ran in the paper, and so did the notes that came with the coins. “A young girl alone in the world” sent sixty cents, “the result of self denial.” An office boy sent five cents as his “mite.” A group of children sent a dollar, “the money we saved to go to the circus with.” A kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa, mailed in $1.35.11
By May the committee was encouraged enough to order work resumed. Only eight of the pedestal’s forty-six courses of masonry were in place.2
Then the statue came. On June 17, 1885, the French naval ship Isère reached New York Harbor with Liberty aboard in 350 pieces, packed in 214 crates.2 Somewhere among them was the arm from Madison Square. The World’s fund was past halfway and still short. The pedestal was far from finished.
It was not far from the outcome Bartholdi had described to Glaenzer three years earlier: “we will be ready and the Americans will have done nothing.”10 The crates were unloaded on Bedloe’s Island to wait.
The money took eight more weeks. On August 11 the World announced that the fund was complete: just over $100,000 from more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom had given a dollar or less. The pedestal was finished the following April.2,11
Still Up There
On October 28, 1886, Bartholdi pulled the rope that dropped the French flag from the statue’s face. “My dream has been realized,” he told a reporter.2
The arm from Madison Square went up with the rest of her and is there still, holding a new torch more than 300 feet above New York Harbor. The old one, the torch New Yorkers once climbed to, came down in 1984 and is kept in the museum on her island.3
That is what makes the old photographs from Madison Square so arresting. There she is before anyone knows what she will become: no body, no pedestal, no assurance that the money will ever be found. Just a copper arm above a city park, and New Yorkers paying fifty cents to climb inside.
Sources
1. Megan Margino, “The Arm That Clutched the Torch: The Statue of Liberty’s Campaign for a Pedestal,” New York Public Library, April 7, 2015. The arm in Madison Square, the fifty-cent climb, and the New York Times of February 26, 1877.
2. Benjamin Levine and Isabelle F. Story, Statue of Liberty National Monument, National Park Service Historical Handbook No. 11 (1954): the American Committee and its finances; Pulitzer’s campaign; the Isère and the dedication.
3. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument: Joseph Pulitzer; Richard Butler; Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi; the original torch.
4. TeachUSHistory, “Colossal Hand and Torch.” Bartholdi’s plan to present the statue on July 4, 1876.
5. Rebekah Oakes, “Lighting the Way,” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, January 2026. The Philadelphia exhibition, the statuettes, and Boston’s bid.
6. Flatiron NoMad Partnership, “Statue of Liberty’s Arm in Mad. Sq. Park,” September 1, 2008. The arm’s place at the northern end of the park and the Times line “a piece of a statue is better than no statue whatever.”
7. Greg Young and Tom Meyers, “When the Statue of Liberty Left Her Arm in Madison Square,” Bowery Boys, February 2022. The arm’s location in the park’s northwest corner.
8. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, American Committee of the Statue of Liberty correspondence (MssCol 69).
9. William M. Evarts to Richard Butler, Paris, May 5, 1881, transcribed by the Raab Collection.
10. Auguste Bartholdi to Georges Glaenzer, Paris, May 4, 1882, transcribed by Le Manuscrit Français. Quotations are translated from the French.
11. Columbia University Libraries, “Joseph Pulitzer and The World: The Statue of Liberty.”
