The Ailing Grande Dame

She has been reviled as a hideous harridan and hailed as a paragon of grace. Henry Ford tried to buy her. Maurice Utrillo painted her portrait. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky dreamed of transporting her to Moscow. Hitler was photographed with her. More tourists visit her than the Statue of Liberty.

Alas, that grande dame of the Paris skyline, the 1,052-ft.-tall Eiffel Tower, is ailing. Parisians fretted last week as the French press disclosed that their cherished 88-year-old monument was in need of $10.5 million worth of repairs. Most alarming is the condition of one of her antique hydraulic elevators that take visitors from the second to the third observation platform. The newsmagazine L 'Express quoted from a confidential 1970 report by the tower's chief engineer, who had warned of the lift's "serious fatigue." A cylinder might burst, he contended, causing the cage to make "a rapid and uncontrollable descent" with its 80-passenger load. The elevator has not yet been fully repaired.

Excessive and Exaggerated. The tower's infirmities came to light just as the Societe de la Tour Eiffel, a private and profitable management company, made a bid to negotiate a loan for the repairs that would be guaranteed by the city of Paris. The resulting outcry in the press appalled the Societe. Scare headlines like WILL THE EIFFEL TOWER DIE? were termed "excessive and exaggerated." Still, tourism is down about 10%, while visitors scanned the struts with nervous attention.

Actually, the structure has been notably accident-free, apart from about 380 suicides. But there have been fears about the tower from the start. It was designed by Bridge Builder Gustave Eiffel in a competition for the Paris Exposition of 1889, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution (among the losing ideas: an oversized guillotine, a giant garden sprinkler poised over the city). There were dire predictions that the structure would attract lightning and somehow kill all the fish in the Seine. Builder Eiffel displayed his disdain for doomsayers by working and entertaining guests in an apartment he had constructed at the top. He was right: heavy storms scarcely sway the tower, and winds pass through the lacy ironwork, budging it no more than four inches.

Philosopher Roland Barthes believes a large part of the tower's fascination is its "fully useless" quality: "It achieved absolute zero as a monument." In a 1975 book, Author Joseph Harriss makes the same point: "Parisians have always recognized the human need for the superfluous." The late playwright Jean Giraudoux, who was born around the time of the tower's conception, came to its defense. It has reached an age, he observed, "when one likes to have children--and American girls--crawling all over one."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.