Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 10:46AM Tweet 
122 years ago today, March 31, 1889, Gustav Eiffel inaugurated La Tour Eiffel.
He climbed her 1,710 steps and planted the French flag at her peak, thus kicking off the 1889 World’s Fair.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:57AM Tweet 
I spent the month of March, 2009, posting about the Eiffel Tower. It was my way of building up to the 120th birthday of Gustav Eiffel's remarkable Iron Lady. Erected for the 1889 World's Fair and slated to stand for only 20 years, Eiffel's "Grand A over the Champs" continues to survive, and inspire, today. Eiffel first inaugurated the Tower on 31 March 1889, climbing 1710 steps and planting a French flag at her peak to kick off the Fair. Yet the same date in 2009 passed quietly by; the Tower's birthday seemed to come and go unnoticed, save for a summer exhibition of Eiffel's life and work at the Paris Hotel de Ville.
But on 22 October 2009, the Eiffel Tower lit up the sky, compelling Parisians to turn out in droves, every night since, on the Trocadero plaza. The Uber-Mensch (UM) and I caught a sideways view of the show from our apartment balcony a few days later. We scooped up the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and went out to see the 12-minute gift of 400 flashing multi-colored LED spotlights this past weekend.
You have until 31 December 2009 to catch it. Shows are at 8, 9, 10, 11 pm every night. If you can't make it, here's the moment captured on camera by Susan Oubari:
Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 1:40PM Tweet You won’t believe what happened last week. I got an unexpected private tour of the Paris Hôtel de Ville (city hall). It happened like this:
Mother-of-the-Uber-Mensch (MUM) and her darling little sis (DLS) were in Paris. They’d flown in to see the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) in the school play. Loo was in rehearsal. The Uber-Mensch (U-M) was working. So I headed out with MUM and DLS to see the exhibit commemorating the 120th Anniversary of the Eiffel Tower: Gustav Eiffel, le magicien du fer (the Magician of Iron) on display now through 29 August 2009.
We approached the only gate that appeared open in the imposing city hall complex. “Excuse me,” I said to a security guard. “Where can we find the exposition Gustav Eiffel?”
“Je suis desolé (I’m sorry),” he responded. “Mais aujourd’hui c’est fermée (But it’s closed today).”
“Closed? But my belle-mère came all the way from New York to see it!” I said (which really wasn’t true, of course. She was here to see Loo.)
“Oo-la-la!” he exclaimed, leaving me momentarily flummoxed and slightly ill-at-ease. “Mais, j’adore New York!” And he went on to tell us, with much 
enthusiasm, that he’d been there for the running of the Marathon last November; that he’d found the New York spectators très sympa (exceptionally nice); that no matter where he went in the city, there was always a friendly stranger to help him; that he’d never enjoyed himself more than during the Greenwich Village Halloween Day Parade; and that he’d been in Times Square on the night of November 4th, when President Obama won the election, and he was so proud to have shared such joy with so many happy and peaceful people.
“Attendez deux secondes (wait two seconds)”, he said. He peeled away to chat à voix basse (in whispered tones) with another gentlemen, who responded with a simple nod. The two then looked in my direction and waved us through the gate.
I thought he’d gotten permission to open the exhibit for us. But no! As it happened, he was waiting for his colleague to relieve him for his 45-minute break just when we arrived. Rather than put up his feet, he decided to take us on a private tour of Mayor Delanoë's office building as a thank you for all the hospitality he’d received while in New York.
Ever since 1357, when then mayor (actually, provost) Etienne Marcel bought the parcel on which the Hôtel de Ville sits, the administration of the city of Paris has been located on this spot. Once a gentle slope leading to the river Seine, the site had been a port for unloading cargo of wood and grain in medieval times. It then became the infamous Place de Grève where Parisians gathered for public executions (the very place where Quadimodo was beaten and Esmeralda hanged in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame).
In 1533, Francois I, the Renaissance King, decided to bestow upon Paris a city hall building worthy of the French capital. It would be the largest in all of Europe and Christendom, filled with space and height and light. Construction was completed nearly 100 years later, in 1628, under the reign of Louis XIII. In 1835 two wings were added, in keeping with the original Renaissance style, to accommodate the needs of an enlarged city government. Otherwise, the building remained unchanged until 1870-71, during the Franco-Prussian War.
In September 1870, Napleon III surrendered to Prussia. Embittered Parisians declared the end of the Empire. A republican government moved into the Hôtel de Ville and assumed the Prussians would go away. But they did not. A bitter four-month siege of the city ensued. After a harsh winter living off cats and dogs and rats when all other meat became scarce, the republicans, too, capitulated to Bismarck, giving up Alsace and Lorraine and agreeing to heavy war reparations.
Angry revolutionaries in Paris broke into the Hôtel de Ville, setting up a rival communard government, called the Paris Commune. The republicans moved out to Versailles, taking their army with them. In May 1871, as anti-communard troops advanced on Paris, extremists set the city ablaze. At the Hôtel de Ville, a fire intended to eradicate all existing revolutionary records did much more than that. It gutted the entire building, leaving it a scorched stone shell.
Reconstruction took place from 1873-1892. While the new Hôtel de Ville edifice retains the exact look of its 16th century predecessor, the restored interior reflects a more lavish 18th century design. Our guide confided to us that he finds the Hôtel de Ville to be even lovelier than the Elysée Palace, home of the French President.
The central corridor of the Hôtel de Ville boasts ceiling-height stained glass windows, bearing family crests of the pre-revolutionary Noblesse de Robe (aristocracy). Murals painted by some of the leading artists of the day, including Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Gervex, adorn the walls of the extravagant banquet halls, salles des fêtes. And sculpture abounds, with such figures as Auguste Rodin having joined 229 other sculptors to provide likenesses of 338 famous Parisians as well as lions and other features.
So you see: what goes around does come around. Thanks to the kindness of New York strangers, the MUM being one, we were given a special bird's-eye view of a special Paris icon.
And that night Loo gave us a show-stopping performance as well!
Images:
Photo of Hotel de Ville de Paris by Tristan Nitot, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of the New York Marathon from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge by Martineric from Lille, France, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of sculpture of Etienne Marcel by by Thierry, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Image of the Hotel de Ville de Paris at the time of the Paris Commune (1871), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of Hotel de Ville courtyard by TwoWings, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:26PM Tweet Though Gustave Eiffel goes down in history as the creator of the famous iron Tower, he was far from alone in this momentous endeavor. A huge cast of characters - scientists, engineers, mathmeticians, architects, metalworkers, and laborers of all kinds - helped him to realize the "A over the Champs-de-Mars". Eiffel did not fail to appreciate this. He engraved beneath the first-level platform the names of 72 notables who worked alongside him to design, develop, and build La Tour Eiffel.
My friend Jeanne, picture-book-author-and-illustrator-extraodinaire, can lay claim to one such recognition! Her maiden name, Bélanger, is forever embossed on the Tower's structure. It was hidden by paint from the early 20th century until 1986-87 when the Iron Lady underwent a massive restoration. But it's there now, plain as day, between Lagrange and Cuvier on the east pillar.
Jeanne writes, "Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Joseph Bélanger was a mathmetician and hydraulic engineer. Whew! Good thing he didn't write his whole name on the tower! It is a bit long!"
Thanks for sharing this family history, Jeanne!
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Do you have a Tower Tale to tell?
Comment here and I'll put it in a post!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 9:05AM Tweet 
The Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) attends school in the shadows of the Eiffel Tower. That means we see it almost every day. We never tire of looking at Eiffel's Iron Lady. From up close or from afar, her graceful majesty never ceases to impress; she always looks dramatic and new. It's hard to believe that at the time of construction, many prominent Parisians rose up in protest against the famous Tour Eiffel.
As the 19th century drew to a close, France’s industrial revolution was in full swing. Many new inventions had revolutionized life: the telephone, the car, vaccines against major diseases. The era was variously called “the spring of technology” or La Belle Epoque. To mark the centennial of the 1789 French Revolution, France invited the world to Paris to take part in the 1889 Universal Exhibition, her second World’s Fair. The architect and structural engineer, Gustav Eiffel, unanimously won the contest to build a metal tower at the mouth of the Champs de Mars, the site of the future event. Eiffel’s Tower, "the A over the Champs", would symbolize France’s prominence in a world undergoing rapid industrial modernization and change.
Work on the Tower foundations began in January 1887. It took five months for workers using nothing more than spades to clear the rubble that was then carted away by horses. The pillars on the park side were easy to stabilize, but the pillars along the Seine required air-compressed foundations using corrugated steel caissons buried five meters under the water.
All 18,038 parts of the tower were built offsite by 300 steelworkers and brought to the Champs de Mars to be locked into place with 2,500,000 rivets. The Tower went up like a giant Erector Set over the course of two years and remarkably, thanks to precautions taken by Eiffel, only one person lost his life on the work-site. When completed, the structure weighed approximately 10,000 tons. Its exponential curves were determined by Eiffel’s understanding of wind resistance. The top can sway up to 12 cms in a high wind.
Eiffel inaugurated his Tower on March 31, 1889, climbing its 1,710 steps to plant the French flag at the peak. It measured 312 meters in height and was the 
tallest building in the world until 1929, when New York’s Chrysler Building surpassed it by 7 meters. (The current height of the Eiffel Tower is 325 meters, if you include the tallest antenna.)
Even at the time of the 1889 World’s Fair, Eiffel equipped his Tower with elevators to lift visitors up to its three levels. The first floor stands at 57 meters, the second at 115 meters, and the third at 276. Elevator construction was considered a great technical achievement at the time, further testament to Eiffel’s engineering genius.
Built initially to last only 20 years, the Eiffel Tower quickly became important for use in meteorology and radio technology, and later played a key role in the development of broadcast television. The first antenna, installed atop the Tower in 1909, launched wireless telegraphy that allowed France to communicate with the US during World War I. Due to these unexpected uses, the Tower escaped demolition. Today, it bears 120 antennae of all sizes and varieties. Fifty to sixty tons of paint applied every seven years protects the Tower from rust.
But before its 19th century inauguration, detractors to La Tour Eiffel raised their voices in collective dissent. In a letter entitled "The Artists Protest", published in Le Temps on 14 February 1887, they baptized it the "Tower of Babel", the "dishonor of Paris", a "gigantic black factory chimney", a "barbaric mass" that dominated and humiliated Gothic Paris. They called the future monument "a hateful column of bolted iron". Eiffel stood by his creation. He responded to his critics, saying “I believe the Tower will have its own beauty”.
It would appear that history has proven him right. By the 1920s, the La Tour Eiffel had become a symbol of French modernism and the avant-garde. Today the Eiffel Tower is Paris’ most iconic monument, welcoming seven million visitors annually.
And 122 years after its inauguration, Loo and her classmates get to play among its shadows almost every day.
Sources:
http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Eiffel/
http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/documentation/pdf/about_the%20Eiffel_Tower.pdf?id=4_11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower
