Statue of Liberty a protester against American immigration policy climbing onto the statue. On October 7, 2016, construction started on a new Statue of Liberty museum on Liberty Island. The new $70 million, museum will be able to accommodate all of the island's visitors when it opens in 2019, as opposed to the current museum, which only 20% of the island's visitors can visit.The museum, designed by FXFOWLE Architects, will integrate with the parkland around it. Von Fürstenberg heads the fundraising for the museum, and the project had garnered more than $40 million in fundraising as of groundbreaking. The statue is situated in
Statue of Liberty the Eiffel factory in the nearby Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret. The change in structural material from masonry to iron allowed Bartholdi to change his plans for the statue's assembly. He had originally expected to assemble the skin on-site as the masonry pier was built; instead he decided to build the statue in France and have it disassembled and transported to the United States for reassembly in place on Bedloe's Island. In a symbolic act, the first rivet placed into the skin, fixing a copper plate onto the statue's big toe, was driven by United States Ambassador to France Levi P.