There was a time when monuments were meant to be visited; now, it seems, they can be owned—at least in parts.
A section of the original staircase from the Eiffel Tower will go up for auction in Paris on May 21, CNN reported, offering collectors the chance to take home a fragment of one of the world’s most recognizable tourist attractions. Aspiring bidders will need more than just deep pockets—the estimate is set at $140,000-$175,000—they’ll also need deep real estate. The piece stands nearly nine-feet-tall and spans more than five feet across.
The lot, handled by Artcurial, comprises 14 steps from the spiral staircase that once linked the tower’s second and third levels. Installed for the monument’s debut at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the staircase carried visitors skyward for nearly a century before being dismantled in 1983, when elevators replaced the climb.
Roughly 20 sections were removed at the time, many of which entered private hands. This example, according to the auction house, has remained in the same collection for more than four decades and was recently restored ahead of the sale.
If the pitch sounds a little grand—“a journey through time,” as one specialist put it—the market has already shown it is willing to indulge. In 2016, another staircase segment sold for $612,000, driven in part by aggressive bidding from a new collector.
Pieces of the tower are now scattered globally, from Paris institutions like the Musée d’Orsay to installations abroad, including one near the Statue of Liberty. The dispersal has turned what was once a singular feat of engineering into a kind of collectible series.
Still, the appeal is easy to understand. Around 7 million people visit the Eiffel Tower each year, joining an estimated 300 million who have made the trip since it opened. Owning a piece of it offers something slightly different: not the experience of ascent, but the illusion of having arrived.
And, in a market increasingly comfortable selling wares from dinosaur skeletons to space memorabilia, a staircase—however historic—feels almost modest.
