The French frigate Isère docked in New York on June 17, 1885, though other accounts and shipping records tie key crate deliveries and customs processing to mid-November as workers continued unpacking and cataloguing over 200 crates of copper plates and iron framework. The statue, a gift from France marking American independence, would not be fully assembled and dedicated until October 1886, delayed by the need to first complete its granite pedestal, funded largely through Joseph Pulitzer's public appeal.
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's colossal copper woman arrived in America not as a single towering figure but as a disassembled puzzle: 350 individual pieces packed into more than 200 wooden crates, stacked in the hold of the Isère. Workers on the docks spent weeks in the fall of 1885 cataloguing the pieces—an outstretched arm here, a sandaled foot there, sheets of hammered copper no thicker than two pennies.
The delay in raising the statue had nothing to do with the statue itself and everything to do with money. Congress had refused to fund a pedestal, so the completed copper figure sat in crates for months while Joseph Pulitzer's New York World ran a relentless fundraising campaign, famously printing the names of every donor, no matter how small the contribution. More than 120,000 people gave, many sending just a few cents, until $102,000 was raised. Gustave Eiffel, who had engineered the statue's internal iron skeleton to sway slightly in strong winds without damage, watched from Paris as his creation waited in pieces on a foreign shore before finally rising over New York Harbor in October 1886.