Statue of Liberty Congress officially renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island, a change advocated by Bartholdi generations earlier. The act also mentioned the efforts to found an American Museum of Immigration on the island, which backers took as federal approval of the project, though the government was slow to grant funds for it. Nearby Ellis Island was made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument by proclamation of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. In 1972, the immigration museum, in the statue's base, was finally opened in a ceremony led by President Richard Nixon. The museum's backers never provided it with an endowment
Conservation-restoration of the Statue of Liberty as one year beginning in 1984. The statue had been closed only once before for such an extended period of time, and that was at one point in the late 1930s. Later announcements stated that the erection of the scaffolding surrounding the outside of the statue would begin in the fall of 1983, and it was still believed in July 1983 that the restoration would begin sometime in the fall. NPS representatives retracted and revised the earlier announcement concerning the closure of the Island to the public; Liberty Island would in fact remain open and closings would be intermittent and