Vera Mukhina, THE sculptor behind the worker and kolkhoz woman sculpture, would’ve probably convinced people to keep it purely for artistic value. She allegedly did it with the “Freedom monument” in Latvia, but the Latvian “Freedom” statue is so ugly I wouldn’t have listened.
We need the statue of liberty because it’s Chekov’s Giant Rolling Head. Any kind of disaster movie set in New York involves the statue turning into a bowling ball that takes out Wall Street. Turn it into a museum for immigrant justice, make sure the head is welded on very poorly.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been, but the island the statue is on along with the pedestal itself is fairly small, so you wouldn’t have much space to work with for a museum. The nearby Ellis island already has a large museum dedicated to immigrant justice too, as that’s where immigrants actually transited into the United States, so another museum would be fairly redundant.
did you know that they actually have to scale the statue up sometimes in movies? The makers of Cloverfield initially depicted Liberty’s head at actual size when it rolls through the streets but test audiences didn’t even recognize it because of how small it is IRL. So they made it way bigger. And in X-Men it’s big enough to have a whole fight on top of the head with room to spare lol
It should be even larger than Cloverfield’s. 100% body size, 800% head size, a guillotine looming over the skyscrapers.