The post office printed commemorative twenty-two-cent stamps, introducing them at New York’s Federal Hall, where George Washington had taken the nation’s first presidential oath. To mark the occasion, the USPS arranged to remove forty pounds of copper from the statue, and had it melted and formed into two fifteen-inch replicas. The replicas were shipped to Cape Canaveral, loaded onto the space shuttle Discovery, removed from the land of liberty and the land of gravity, and then shipped back to New York, where one was melted down yet again into Official Centennial Seals, and the other now resides in the museum in the pedestal of the statue.
Ultimately, Iacocca’s campaign raised $277 million ($1.4 billion in today’s dollars) and threw it at a three-hundred-foot-tall metal object on an island on the windy, rainy, salty, humid Atlantic Coast.
It took three months, and $2 million, to erect the scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty. Engineers had considered bamboo scaffolding, Asian style, and also considered a pyramid. They considered a lattice anchored by cables, like a suspension bridge. They settled on a grid of all new aluminum poles, coated in zinc, to prevent the metal from staining the copper. It weighed three hundred tons and used two miles of half-inch steel cable, and was strong enough to support the statue’s right arm, and able to withstand winds of up to one hundred miles per hour. By April 1984, you could climb up, lean forward, and give the statue a kiss.
On July 4, the old torch was removed and lowered to the ground. Seven months later, it was on the lead float in the Tournament of Roses Parade, with Miss America. It had been escorted to the airport by the NYPD, and shipped to California in a special container, then guarded by Park Service rangers. No rusty bird cage has ever been treated so well.
Workers on the scaffolding got a close look at the exterior of the statue, and discovered many surprises that received less fanfare. They found graffiti: a B from Bartholdi, some names of the men who’d worked on the statue in 1937, and, on the big toe, the inscription “Alone with God and the Statue, Christmas Eve.” Drummond had left no John Hancock. They found bird nests in the folds of the statue’s robe, with masses of guano dating from the nineteenth century. This they scraped away. They found torn rivets that looked like dimples, and tears in the copper, and stains where coal tar and paint had oozed through the seams. There were paint spatters on the back of the statue’s arm, and a dark splotch on her back, either from Liberty Island’s trash incinerator, or from acid rain. Significant pieces at the bottom of the statue’s hair curls were missing, having corroded away. She had scabs, symptoms of “bronze plague,” on her crown rays. There were cracks in her left eye, in her lips, in her nose, and in her chin. She had a big stain on the front of her neck, almost like drool. She had rust boogers. The condition of her skin was so bad that the French-American Committee proposed coating all of it in clear resin, a suggestion that Bartholdi had made ninety-four years earlier. Instead, damaged sections—almost 2 percent of the statue’s surface area—were fixed as required with new copper. The hole in her bicep was patched, and her spike readjusted a few degrees.
Inside the statue, repairs were more difficult. The lead paint, coal tar, and disintegrated asbestos had to be removed before anything could be done to the copper. Men in white suits spent two weeks removing the paint by freezing it off with liquid nitrogen. Once frozen, it flaked off in sheets. Union Carbide showed them how to do it, waving magic wands. It took three weeks, and 3,500 gallons of liquid nitrogen. To remove the paint from the iron frame, a company called Blast and Vac was summoned. It invented what looks like a giant electric toothbrush. “Basically,” a company rep described, “we installed a standard blasting nozzle inside a vacuum cleaner head.” But still, the coal tar remained. The coal tar was more stubborn, reacting as it had with various corrosion products. Sandblasting would have removed it, but also would have damaged the copper, which was only 3/32 of an inch thick. Same for most other abrasives, and most solvents. Engineers tried blasting samples of copper with cherry pits, ground corncobs, plastic pellets, walnut shells, powdered glass, salt, rice, and sugar, to no avail. Finally, without consulting the Park Service’s corrosion consultant, none other than Robert Baboian, the Park Service settled on sodium bicarbonate: baking soda. Arm & Hammer reassured the NPS that it wouldn’t damage the copper, and donated forty tons of it.
Since late 1983, Baboian had visited the statue dozens of times; climbed all over her. By the time he showed up in January 1985, baking soda was caked inches thick inside the statue and was leaking out through many holes. Workers had blasted it at 60 psi (pounds per square inch) all over the coal tar. On the inside, it was reacting with the copper, and turning it blue; on the outside, it was destroying the patina, and dramatically staining the statue in places. It was a disaster, even if it removed the coal tar. “It was a big mistake,” Baboian told me. “It did a job on the outside of the statue.” Arm & Hammer claimed the baking soda “did not harm the copper” but admitted there were some “unexpected results.” Immediately, the inside of the statue got a wash with mild vinegar, and the outside received a daily shower until the baking soda was gone. The blue tint went away in a few weeks, but the stains remain, because it takes about thirty years for the patina to fully form.
Baboian knew a lot about the patina. Wisely, he compared the thickness of the exposed copper to a spot where some of the black coal tar had oozed out and covered it, thus protecting it from both sides, and determined the rate at which the copper was corroding. It was vanishing at a rate of .0013 millimeters per year. At that pace, he figured it’d last a thousand years. The patina on the dark patches on the statue, Baboian found, were a mineral called antlerite, rather than brochantite, and it was anywhere from one half to one tenth as thick. Thomas Graedel and John Franey, at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, furthered his research, and took nine samples of copper from the statue, and seven samples from similar copper roofs at their office, and examined the patina’s growth, depth, formation, cementation, and erosion. Using mass spectrometry and X-ray diffraction, they found chlorine trapped inside the patina, which was bad news. Chlorine has an insatiable appetite for metals. But they also determined that the patina didn’t erode as long as the pH of rain or fog was above 2.5. In fact, they found that patina growth was twice as rapid as it had been a century before. They also matched a sample of the copper in the statue with a sample of copper from the Visnes mine, on Norway’s Karmoy Island, and put to rest the debate about the source of her metal.
Baboian (who had run Texas Instruments’s corrosion laboratory) also studied the interaction between the copper and the iron frame. The statue, he determined, “was an ideal configuration for galvanic corrosion.” On account of the copper, the iron was corroding one hundred times faster than it would by itself. Worse, because the surface area of the copper was so large compared with that of the iron, corrosion was sped up another tenfold. The interaction also retarded the corrosion of the copper, which is what formed the green patina. As Martha Goodway, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, later wrote, “the structural design of the statue was innovative, but the materials chosen to realize this design were not.” Had the statue been built only a decade later, steel, rather than wrought iron, would have been used, and the story would be different.
So Baboian and others set about determining what type of metal to replace the iron with. In March 1984 he began testing five different alloys on a beach in North Carolina, at the LaQue Center for Corrosion Technology. Since the replacement metal had to have similar properties to iron, and be compatible with copper, he had few practical choices. He tested a plain steel, an aluminum-bronze, a copper-nickel alloy, a new alloy called ferralium, and marine-grade stainless steel, which was invented a generation after Bartholdi decided to employ iron in the statue. Because the samples were eighty feet from the shore, they corroded twenty-two times faster than they did inside the statue. After six months, Baboian had the equivalent of eleven years of corrosion to examine, and ruled out all but the ferralium
and the stainless steel, which he recommended to the Park Service. Engineers then figured out that ferralium wouldn’t work, because bending it required heating it, and heating it destroyed its anticorrosive properties. Stainless steel it was.
Repairing the statue’s frame proved the most challenging task yet. The frame was in such bad condition that the notion of preservation was abandoned. The whole thing was replaced, piece by piece. That meant 1,825 unique six-foot ribs, weighing 25 pounds each, and all of the fasteners necessary to connect them to the copper: a couple of thousand U-shaped clamps, nearly four thousand bolts, and twelve thousand copper rivets. The rivets were prepatined, so that it wouldn’t appear that the Statue of Liberty had chicken pox. Because the frame was already weak, it was necessary to distribute the work, so as not to overstress the structure. The statue was divided into quadrants, from which one rib was removed at a time. Once removed, the copper was braced. The rib was brought to the metalworking shop near the base of the statue, where the torch was also being remade. There metalworkers fabricated a new rib, exactly like the old rib, by running 30,000 amps through it for five minutes, until, at 1,900 degrees, it became bendable. Once bent to the proper shape, it was quenched in water, sandblasted, labeled, wrapped up, and sent to Manhattan, where it was treated with nitric acid to re-create the outer, corrosion-resistant, patina-like layer of the metal. From removal to replacement, the process took thirty-six hours, including one hour just to manhandle the new rib back up the confines of the statue. The metalworkers worked around the clock for six months, fabricating seventy ribs a week.
Where the asbestos had been, isolating the skin from the frame, workers now used Teflon tape. Where Drummond had found gaps between the copper plates, workers now sealed the seams with silicone, kitchen style. To keep condensation from forming, a humidity-control system was installed. On the frame’s main girders, workers slathered three coats of an inorganic zinc paint that had been developed by NASA, and tested in Hawaii; Astoria, Oregon; and on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (Because zinc is less noble than iron, it would corrode, rather than the frame, just as the iron had corroded when partnered with copper.) The manufacturer created a water-based, rather than solvent-based, version of the paint, so that fumes wouldn’t turn the statue into a giant gas tank. On top of the paint, they put a layer of epoxy, to make graffiti-removal easier. By the time engineers got to the statue’s shoulder, the preservationists had won out. The lady’s shoulder was offset by a foot and a half, and her head was offset by two feet—an assembly error. Even though the frame there was overstressed and overly flexible, engineers decided to brace it rather than rebuild it.
Finally, on July 4, 1986, a new torch was lifted into place. The torch had been meticulously designed to Bartholdi’s original plan: a solid flame, to be illuminated by lights from the outside. Instead of just copper, though, the flame was covered in gold leaf. Beneath it, the copper plates, which had been joined with 2,600 rivets, which were filled with solder and ground flush, were degreased, then chemically etched, then primed, then covered in three layers of varnish, the recipe for which dated from the eighteenth century, as on a violin. The gold was applied while the last coat was still tacky. Over the vents in the pendant below, bird screens were installed.
Take that, rust.
Reagan hailed the Statue of Liberty restoration as one of the highlights of his presidency, and as a flagship initiative on public-private partnership. Private companies had donated generators, cranes, paint, and copper, and hundreds of thousands of hours of their engineers’ time. Black & Decker donated tools, and replacement tools. John Deere donated tractors. Coca-Cola lent $500,000, interest free. Sealand donated shipping containers for storage. The Cabot Corporation donated ferralium, the Specialty Steel Institute of North America donated stainless steel, AT&T donated its prepatinated roof, and Arm & Hammer might have been wise baking a few million muffins. The Ad Council donated $50 million of airtime—the most ever allotted to one campaign. Yet some corporate relationships raised hackles. Some company executives, asked to donate materials, stipulated plaques signed by Reagan thanking them for their work. One marketer proposed removing the statue’s arm solely for publicity and admitted that he aimed to get rich on the restoration. He asked Moffitt if he wanted to resign and join his board, so he could get rich too. Another marketing group, actually hired, scammed the restoration foundation, proceeding on promotional projects—like twenty-five million boxes of Kellogg’s cereal—without approval. Objectionably, the head of the group garnered separate marketing contracts from statue sponsors including the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery, U.S. Tobacco, and Time magazine. The Department of the Interior questioned his scruples. Another company offered $12 million for parts and materials removed from the statue, to be fashioned into gewgaws—a proposal that even the Park Service found undignified.
The commercialization irked many. Michael Kinsley, in the New Republic, feared that Miss Liberty was becoming a “high-priced tart.” The New York Times editorial page warned that “no restoration is worth putting a national monument on the market.” Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post, wrote that the price for the statue’s survival “should not be her virtue.” George Will saw nothing wrong. Commercialization was described in newspapers as “an insult to Emma Lazarus’s tired, poor and huddled masses,” and as “cultural sacrilege.” Even media rights became an issue, as the centennial approached. How could ABC purchase exclusive rights—for $10 million—to a celebration, on public land, of a national holiday?
That was the least of the difficulties. Philip Kleiner, of Lehrer McGovern, the construction management company, described the restoration as the “ultimate fast track project,” because every job was unique; most contractors weren’t willing to get involved, and those that thought they could do the work usually couldn’t. The chronicler of the restoration, Ross Holland, wrote that, “if Murphy’s Law ever applied to anything, it applied in spades to the Statue of Liberty restoration project.”
There were long delays, attributed to the French team, which seemed to be in no rush, and was abandoned by the Americans in August 1984. After that, the pace was hectic; construction managers, who complained about doing research and development at the same time, got their final drawings delivered on July 3, the day before the torch returned.
There were cost quibbles, after millions of dollars were wasted on a year and a half of nothing much, and another couple million was wasted on a TV special. To make up for it, an executive vice president suggested cost cutting by using plastic rather than ceramic tiles, and regular steel rather than stainless. American companies scrutinized contracts that went to foreign companies, claiming they could do the same work for a third less, and employ New Yorkers too.
But even when the work went to New Yorkers, unions bickered over turf. Though Liberty Island belongs to New York, the piers and docks belong to New Jersey, and Congressman Frank Guarini, along with the mayor of Jersey City, pushed for at least half of the labor to come from New Jersey unions. When the scaffolding was to be delivered, via boat, by a member of the carpenters’ union, the marine operating engineers’ union complained and threatened to picket the Marine Inspection Office, clogging up works at the Coast Guard. Teamsters and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers battled over the electrical contract. Union 580, a New York ironworkers union, protested the granting of the torch-building to a French firm—and picketed the press conference announcing their selection. Not quite Drummond-style, they unfurled a banner, then gave the French workers hats and T-shirts featuring the number 580.
The political battling was uglier. After Iacocca denigrated Reagan’s economic policies, in the spring of 1984, rumors began circulating that he was considering a run for president as a Democrat. On Independence Day that year, when the old torch came down, Reagan snubbed Iacocca by not attending the ceremony. Instead, he went to a NASCAR race in Daytona. A year and a half later, less than a week after Iacocca announced that he’d raised the $2
30 million he’d hoped to, he was sacked from the commission.
By then, the restoration foundation was in trouble. In the summer of 1985, Congressman Bruce Vento, chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation, held hearings on the relationship between the foundation and the National Park Service. Vento didn’t like the authority of the foundation. He spoke on 20/20 of an “improper delegation of power,” and said that commercialization of the statue was “not unlike a whore who’s being pimped on the sidewalk.” He told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the foundation seemed “a quasi government structure . . . Who the hell elected them?” There were allegations of threats, reports of the project being “in a total state of chaos.” He complained that the foundation was amassing the largest mailing list in history, and that it might be used for political purposes. He asked the US General Accounting Office (GAO), which investigates government expenditures for Congress, to audit the project.
To cap it all off, when the scaffolding was removed, and the Statue of Liberty revealed in all her glory for the first time in two and a half years, a black scar on her face drew attention. It was a streak caused by the baking soda, and only time would turn it green, but a rumor formed that the mark was from workers, who, rather than climb down the scaffolding and use the bathrooms on the ground, had urinated on her face.
Rust: The Longest War Page 4
