12 Famous Landmarks Then and Now, Like Big Ben’s Clock Faces That Were Never Black

When the Statue of Liberty was finished in 1886, it was more of a traditional brown color, like an American penny. Its copper skin is about 3/32 of an inch thick, the same as two pennies placed together.

Over the next 30 years or so, the copper oxidized and slowly formed the green coating, called a patina, that we know today. Edward Moran painted the unveiling in 1886; the second photo shows her today.

The first part of the statue to be finished was the hand holding the torch. In 1876 it was shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and then it was displayed in Madison Square in New York City until 1882, while Americans raised money for the pedestal. The head and shoulders were shown in Paris in 1878.

The whole statue finally arrived in New York Harbor in pieces on June 17, 1885. That first torch was replaced in the 1980s, and it is now on display in the Statue of Liberty Museum.

While the Eiffel Tower went up in 1887 and 1888, its parts were painted Venetian red. For the 1889 World’s Fair it got a thick coat of reddish brown. It turned shades of yellow in 1899, yellow-brown in 1907 and a bronze-like “Eiffel Tower Brown” in 1968.

In the 136 years, it has been repainted 20 times, mostly by hand with brushes. For the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, it went back to the yellow-brown that Gustave Eiffel himself chose in 1907.

The clock tower known as Big Ben, now officially the Elizabeth Tower, was finished in 1859. During the conservation work from 2017 to 2022, paint experts studied more than 160 years of layers and found six different color schemes.

The black on the clock dials was probably chosen in the 1930s to hide the soot of London’s pollution. Under it was architect Charles Barry’s original design: Prussian blue dials with gold details. That is the color the clock faces wear again today, along with regilded details and new glass.

In 1923, a real estate development in the hills above Los Angeles put up a $21,000 billboard that read “HOLLYWOODLAND.” It was slated to last only a year and a half.

The development went bust in the early 1940s, and the city quietly took over the sign in 1944. By 1973 it was falling apart, and it was declared a Los Angeles landmark that year. In 1978 it was rebuilt with new letters, the nine that still stand on the hill today.

The steel for the Golden Gate Bridge arrived coated in red lead primer. As the towers rose in the 1930s, the consulting architect Irving F. Morrow watched them from the ferry he took to work, and he was inspired by that color.

He studied other options, including black, gray and aluminum, and chose a custom shade called International Orange. It blends with the hills around the bay and stands out against the sea and the sky. The bridge opened in 1937.

For most of its history, the Great Sphinx of Giza was buried in sand up to its shoulders, leaving what Smithsonian magazine called “a vast disembodied head.” In 1817, an Italian captain led 160 men in the first modern attempt to dig it out, but the sand poured back in nearly as fast as they could clear it.

The Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan finally freed it in the late 1930s. Carved from a single mass of limestone, the Sphinx is about 66 feet tall and 240 feet long.

In 1854, the society building the Washington Monument ran out of money, and the project ground to a halt. Twenty-five years later, the U.S. government took over and finished the upper two-thirds by 1884, using marble from a different quarry.

At first, the two sections looked almost the same. Wind, rain and time weathered them differently, and now the change in color partway up is easy to spot. A third kind of marble shows right at the line between the two phases.

Carving at Mount Rushmore ran from Oct. 4, 1927, to Oct. 31, 1941, with nearly 400 men and women working on it. Powdermen set charges of exact sizes, and 90% of the rock was removed with dynamite.

When only a few inches were left, drillers made rows of holes very close together, called honeycombing, so the last layer could be chipped off by hand. Visitors loved those honeycomb pieces. One hoist operator would pretend he might get in trouble, sell a piece for $6, then phone the top of the mountain: “Boys send down another one!”

Edward Carlson, an organizer of Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair, saw a broadcast tower with a restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany, and doodled an idea for a tower on a napkin in a hotel café.

The basic tower was finished in December 1961, eight months after work began, and it opened on April 21, 1962, the first day of the fair. Its first paint job matched the fair’s space theme: “Astronaut White” legs, an “Orbital Olive” core, a “Re-entry Red” halo and a “Galaxy Gold” roof.

The Eiffel Tower went up in 2 years, 2 months and 5 days for the 1889 World’s Fair, and 2 million people visited it in its first year. It was only supposed to stay up for 20 years.

What kept it standing was science. The tower became a giant laboratory, and its use for wireless telegraphy “saved it from destruction after the initially scheduled period of 20 years,” its official site says. Antennas still crown its top today.

Construction of the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930, and the steel framework rose about 4½ stories a week. The 102-story building was finished in a record-breaking one year and 45 days, and it opened on May 1, 1931.

It stayed the tallest building in the world for the next 40 years. The photographer Lewis Hine followed the ironworkers up as it rose, and his pictures of them high on the beams are still how most of us imagine that year.