![\"Statue](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/shutterstock_111338309-1024x683.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Ask most New Yorkers what they know about the Statue of Liberty<\/a>, and you\u2019ll get the same two or three facts everyone learned in school. Two of the most common ones aren\u2019t quite right\u2026 <\/p>\n She\u2019s been standing in New York Harbor<\/a> since her dedication on October 28, 1886, and in that time she\u2019s picked up a couple of myths<\/a> that even people who grew up looking at her every day tend to repeat. Around 3.8 million people visit her every year,<\/a> and most of them would tell you the color and the torch\u2019s access have always looked exactly like they do now.<\/p>\n The Statue of Liberty wasn\u2019t always green<\/p>\n The statue\u2019s skin is 3\/32 of an inch of copper, about the thickness of two pennies, and copper that thin doesn\u2019t stay green on its own. When she was unveiled, the statue<\/a> was a dull, reddish-bronze, closer to the color of a new penny than the seafoam she\u2019s known for now.<\/p>\n The National Park Service<\/a> puts the change at roughly 25 to 30 years: oxygen and salt air off the harbor reacting with the copper to form patina, the same greenish coating that shows up on old bronze statues everywhere. Nobody has an exact date for when she finished changing color, since color photography of the statue barely existed yet, but by the early 1900s the transformation most people assume was always there had already happened.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStatue of Liberty & Ellis Island: Entrance + Tour of 9\/11 Memorial & Wall Street\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n The patina isn\u2019t just cosmetic, either. That same greenish layer acts as a protective seal, which is part of why the copper skin underneath has needed so little structural repair compared to the iron framework holding it up. The bronze newcomer New Yorkers<\/a> occasionally compare her to today is closer to what tourists in 1886 actually saw than the statue in front of them now.<\/p>\n The torch you can\u2019t climb to<\/p>\n The other mix-up is about access. Visitors who climb the 377 steps to the crown sometimes assume they\u2019re near the torch, or that it was simply closed for crowd control. It\u2019s neither. The torch<\/a> has been off-limits to the public since July 30, 1916, when the Black Tom explosion damaged the statue and closed the staircase leading to the torch.<\/p>\n The explosion happened at a munitions depot across the harbor during a German sabotage operation, and the blast was powerful enough to damage the torch arm and leave shrapnel embedded in the statue\u2019s right side. While the rest of the statue<\/a> remained structurally intact, the original torch was eventually replaced decades later.<\/p>\n What visitors see today isn\u2019t even the original flame. The current torch, a copper flame covered in 24-karat gold leaf<\/a>, replaced the 1886 version in 1986. It\u2019s lit from inside, and park staff use a 40-foot ladder to reach it for maintenance. <\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-960610004-1024x683.jpg\")
Getty Images \/ Istvan Kadar Photography<\/p>\n![\"Statue](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Statue-of-Liberty-daylight-1024x683.jpg\")
Shutterstock \/ Igor Link-<\/p>\n