Statue of Liberty of War; since 1933 it has been maintained by the National Park Service. Public access to the balcony around the torch has been barred for safety since 1916. According to the National Park Service, the idea for the Statue of Liberty was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time. The project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between de Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist, and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in
Conservation-restoration of the Statue of Liberty the statue's remarkable structure. The second hypothesis was that the Americans, after having uncrated the different sections of the statue in 1886, incorrectly reassembled the structural framework. The third hypothesis is that the statue’s creator, Bartholdi, was aesthetically dissatisfied when the statue was fully assembled and displayed in Paris on or just prior to July 4, 1884, and that he must have willingly sacrificed the structural integrity for his aesthetic vision. One of the main architects of the restoration project was initially convinced that the second hypothesis was correct, but according to a quoted and published statement, recent research had