The Eiffel Tower: What the City Rejected, Then Claimed

We had been here before, Aaron and I, in a different Paris — before the fence, before the glass walls, before the security lines. That was 2002. This was 2018, and we had brought our sons.

The day started in the Tuileries — the formal garden running from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde, its central axis pointing west toward the city’s grand ceremonial sequence. We walked the length of it, past the round pond where children sail their toy boats on warmer days, then out to the Place de la Concorde, centered around a Luxor Obelisk, and along the Champs-Élysées. The World Cup had just ended — France its victor — and the sports stores along the avenue were doing considerable business in jerseys. We stopped at several. Then the Arc de Triomphe — at the top, the twelve avenues radiate outward in the pattern Haussmann designed to make the city legible from above and navigable below — we turned south through the 16th toward the tower.

I had stood at the base of it sixteen years earlier, when access was entirely open — walked directly across Pont d’Iéna to its underbelly, stood under the base of four enormous arched legs meeting overhead, took the elevator to the top before the city was fully awake. No queue, no barrier, no perimeter to manage. That morning I had made a mental note about Tour Montparnasse: the only place in Paris with a view that includes the Eiffel Tower without the 1973 skyscraper in it.

That Paris is not the Paris we returned to.

The Fence

The Corten steel fence — ten feet high — and the 2.5-inch thick bulletproof glass walls were still under construction on two sides when we arrived that July afternoon. The perimeter had been installed following terrorism threats in the years since 2002, a visible alteration to the experience of one of the world’s most visited sites. The day was hot and the crowds were thick and chaotic in the construction zone. African vendors worked the tourists steadily; we kept our bags close, moved through, and eventually cleared the security line.

Beneath the tower itself the experience was unchanged. The four of us stood under those arched legs and the ironwork did what it always does at close range: it surprised. Seven thousand three hundred tons that reads as lace from below, the two and a half million rivets that hold it together individually visible at this scale, the groin vault of the four legs forming an overhead canopy that is simultaneously enormous and delicate. The mass and the lightness coexist, which is the engineering achievement — a structure this tall that doesn’t feel heavy from beneath it.

The boys had no interest in the paid visit to the top since Aaron and I had already made it. What we had wanted them to have was this: the scale of it, the ironwork at close range, the sense of standing inside a structure that is more than its photographs suggest. They were teenagers in July and it was hot and they were unlikely to report being overwhelmed. But they had stood beneath it, and it had registered. We continued through the 7th to Rue Cler for a jambon-beurre — the baguette, the butter, the ham, the afternoon — before heading back to our hotel.

The Building and Its History

The Eiffel Tower received heavy criticism when it was built in 1889 — constructed as the entrance arch to the Exposition Universelle, the World’s Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution, in what its critics described as an industrial intrusion on the classical skyline. The objections were genuine: this was wrought iron, an engineering material, not stone or masonry, the historic languages of civic architecture. A 300-meter lattice of metal had no place at the symbolic center of Paris.

Someone — the attribution is contested between William Morris and Guy de Maupassant — is believed to have said: “When I’m in Paris I go to the Eiffel Tower because it’s only when I’m there that I can’t see the damned thing.” I feel the same about Tour Montparnasse.

The tower was built as a temporary structure intended to stand for twenty years, after which it would be dismantled. It survived through scientific usefulness — radio transmission, meteorological observation, telecommunications — and through the gradual, complete reversal of public opinion that makes it one of architectural history’s more interesting cases. The city that rejected it came to claim it. The iron eyesore became the Iron Lady. Seven million visitors a year, 75% of them from outside France, the most-visited paid monument in the world.

At the top of the tower, Paris organizes itself into its larger spatial logic: the Seine bisecting the city in its long curve, the grand boulevards radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame’s Gothic towers rising from the Île de la Cité where the city began. The Champ de Mars running straight to the École Militaire, Les Invalides’ gold dome beyond it. The Beaux-Arts Pont Alexandre III spanning the river, the Grand Palais and Petit Palais flanking its far end. Sacré-Cœur on the hill of Montmartre through the haze.

The mid-level is my preferred vantage — close enough to the city to feel connected to it, the skyline making its collective argument at eye level: creamy Lutetian limestone, blue-grey Mansard rooftops with dormer windows and iron balconies — the Second Empire elements standardized by Haussmann into the coherent ensemble the city has maintained since the 1860s.

Christmas Eve 2025

We came back in December — our first wintry morning of the trip, grey sky, cold air, the city quieter in its winter register. We walked the Champ de Mars toward the tower on our first morning. The lines were short. We stayed outside the fence and continued on our walk to Rue Cler, the tower simply present in the background, not demanding anything.

It remained there across the days that followed — visible from corners all over the city, appearing unexpectedly above rooftops: from the esplanade at Les Invalides, from Pont Alexandre III, from the galleries of the Galeries Lafayette, from wherever the geometry of the streets opened a long enough sightline. Part of the landscape rather than a destination.

On Christmas Eve we all went to the Christmas market along the Promenade du Quai Branly. Coming up from the metro, we rounded the corner and the lit tower appeared suddenly directly overhead, close and brilliant against the December night sky, all four of us bundled head to toe against the cold. We had timed the walk for the top of the hour. For five minutes the sparkling white light show played over the tower’s steady golden glow, the whole structure flickering and glittering above the city.

From there we took the metro to Île Saint-Louis for dinner at Les Fous de l’Île — a three-course holiday menu, the kind of small Parisian restaurant that manages intimacy and excellence without effort. It became the most memorable meal of the trip. The evening had begun with the tower overhead and ended at a table that deserved the occasion.

The Eiffel Tower was the city’s most contested building, then its most beloved, then its most secured, and finally — on a cold Christmas Eve with its lights sparkling above a market — simply Paris being most itself. The city that once tried to tear it down has made it inseparable from its identity. That arc is the building’s real story, and it took more than a century to complete.

---

The Eiffel Tower connects to the Paris Atlas and the Early Modern Style Guide. The first time we stood beneath it — 2002, before the fence — is part of the Paris Left Bank story →