Liberty Island months in crates waiting for its pedestal to be finished, and was then reassembled in four months. On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was unveiled by President Grover Cleveland. The name Liberty Island was made official by Congress in 1956. 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 original torch will be relocated here,
Liberty Island for ferry service to and from the island. At the time of European colonization of the Hudson River estuary in the mid-17th century, much of the west side of Upper New York Bay contained large tidal flats which hosted vast oyster beds, a major source of food for the Lenape native people who lived there at the time. Several islands were not completely submerged at high tide. Three of them (later known as Bedloe's/Love/Liberty, Ellis, and Black Tom) were given the name Oyster Islands ("oester eilanden") by the Dutch settlers of New Netherland, the first European colony in the Mid-Atlantic