1/26/2024 0 Comments Patina greenThe Army was in charge of the Statue then, because it had been erected on Bedloe’s Island, which was an active military base. Pieces of the Colossus lay for nine hundred years where they had fallen, until the seventh century, when they were sold for scrap.Īs might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do. By then, it probably was a shade of blackish-green. The Rhodes Colossus stood for about fifty-six years, until 226 B.C., when it broke off at the knees and collapsed in an earthquake. A monumental bronze statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, which portrayed Helios, the sun god, provided Auguste Bartholdi with the inspiration for the Statue. The thin layer of oxidation that covers copper (and bronze, an alloy made mostly of copper) can preserve the metal for centuries, even millennia, as shown by objects from the ancient world. By 1906, oxidation had covered it with a green patina. Later, he was ruined in the copper crash of 1889.Īt the Statue’s unveiling, in 1886, it was brown, like a penny. Secrétan probably took it from a mine in which he held an interest on an island off the coast of Norway. A copper magnate named Pierre-Eugène Secrétan donated most of it-the sculpture required about a hundred tons. The Statue’s copper is only three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick and unusually pure. Copper is a noble metal, which means that it does not react readily with other substances. The Statue of Liberty’s exterior is made of copper, and it turned that shade of green because of oxidation. From there the new color began to spread across the Bronx. Another machine shook the can to mix them. The formula was typed on the paint-spattered keyboard of a Gennex Fluid Management tinter, which then squirted the constituent colors-school-bus yellow, dark green, and black-into a can of oil-based white paint. New Palace sells mostly Benjamin Moore paint, which had no factory-made color to match Magistro’s sample, so the eye of the store’s spectrophotometer read the sample, found a mixture of colors to duplicate it, and gave a formula. “We’ve had people walk in here and see our trim and say, ‘I want that color.’ ” “People love the color,” Ascatigno told me. Ascatigno, the son of the owner, said they call the color Home Builders Green, for the name of Magistro’s general-contracting company. When I made a visit to the store one afternoon, I saw that its own window trim is Statue of Liberty green. He ordered the paint from New Palace Paint Supply, on East 180th Street, which also sells paint in bulk to the Department of Transportation, the Parks Department, and the New York City Housing Authority. He doesn’t remember where he got the sample. Velasquez’s boss, Peter Magistro, chose the color for his company’s signature trim fifteen or twenty years ago. Later, as Velasquez and I walked through Morris Heights, I noticed a lot of buildings with fire escapes of that particular green, or variations on it. Now I saw how the contrasting Statue of Liberty green trim set off the brown or clay-yellow brickwork of the buildings, making them appear elegantly turned out, as if for review in an apartment-building parade. Forty years ago, when I lived in a loft on Canal Street, my fire escape was a faded red, as were many fire escapes, as many still are. When I heard the name of the color, the fire escapes popped into focus for the first time. Sometimes the right words can transform your eyes. “You can always tell Bronx Pro buildings because we paint our fire escapes and window trim Statue of Liberty green.” “That building is ours, and so is that one, and that,” he said, pointing up and down Andrews Avenue South. The next phase would be to continue the painting onto the roof of the building across the street. We strolled around on the painting, examining it. Now the heat-reflecting paint would help cool the building in summer, and the design’s images stood out in satellite photos of the city seen from above. A designer had given him a plan on paper and he had successfully transposed it to the fifteen-thousand-square-foot roof. Edwin Velasquez, a young man who works for Bronx Pro Group, a developer of affordable housing, was showing me a roof painting he had superintended. That elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green got into my head last year when I was standing on the roof of an apartment building in the Bronx. Recently I’ve been thinking about the color of the Statue of Liberty. When you have the Statue’s green on the brain, you see it everywhere.
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