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
Replicas of the Statue of Liberty current one was re-built in 1981. During the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, Chinese student demonstrators in Beijing built a 10 m (33 ft) image called the "Goddess of Democracy", which sculptor Tsao Tsing-yuan said was intentionally "dissimilar" to the Statue of Liberty to avoid being "too openly pro-American." (See article for a list of replicas of that statue.) A replica can be found in Window of the World Park. A 15 foot high replica of the Statue of Liberty is at the western entrance of the village of Arraba in Israel, near a local restaurant. At a highway intersection