Fourteen Steps Back to 1889

Pieces of the original Eiffel Tower interior spiral staircase—14 steps from the historic climb between the second and third levels—are coming to market, prompting a reflection on what happens to shared history as time moves on.

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Image via Smithsonian Magazine

Fourteen Steps Back to 1889

Smithsonian Magazine was out with a report that made me pause the morning paper and just sit there a moment: pieces of the original spiral staircase that once carried visitors up inside the Eiffel Tower are coming to market—14 of the original steps from a climb that, in its full form, totaled 1,062 steps between the second and third levels.

The story reaches back to 1889, when that interior staircase was installed as part of the Eiffel Tower’s early visitor route. It wasn’t the kind of wide, comfortable stairwell you’d find in a courthouse or a school. This was a tight spiral with a single guardrail—dizzying, dramatic, the sort of thing that asked you to trust your feet and your nerve. Long before modern crowd-control and safety signage, people simply lined up, held on, and climbed.

Smithsonian notes that the staircase is now gone from the tower itself, replaced by later arrangements more suited to the volume and expectations of today’s tourism. But fragments of that 137-year-old structure didn’t just vanish into scrap. Sections have been preserved in several French museums, little saved slices of an age when engineering was as much public spectacle as it was utility. And now, remarkably, a handful of the original steps—real, physical iron you can run your hand along—are being offered for sale.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine.

✍ My Take: There’s something fitting about the Eiffel Tower’s old steps being scattered—some in museums, some in private hands—because that’s what happens to the best parts of history when time moves on. A landmark becomes a logo, and the experience becomes a queue, and then one day you realize the thing you loved has been improved into something a little less itself. It reminds me of how Main Street used to feel before the big-box stores arrived with their acres of parking and their identical aisles. Nothing “wrong” with convenience, but the little textures get rubbed smooth. My dad used to talk about inflation like it was weather: you couldn’t stop it, but you ignored it at your peril. In 1979, he’d stand at the kitchen counter and shake his head over the price of groceries, saying the dollar didn’t feel as sturdy as it used to. That same quiet lesson applies here, in a different way. We’re living in an era where even memory has a price tag, where artifacts get treated like assets, and people with means can buy what used to belong—emotionally, anyway—to everybody. I don’t begrudge a collector, but I do hope we don’t become a world where the only way to touch history is to outbid someone. Still, I can’t pretend I don’t understand the pull. Owning one of those steps isn’t about having “stuff.” It’s about having proof that the past was real and made of metal and sweat and ambition. And if a few of these steps land in homes where they’re cherished—and talked about at dinner tables the way families used to talk about where they came from—then maybe that’s not such a bad fate. We can’t keep everything intact. But we can keep the stories intact, and that’s the part that matters most. There’s hope in that: even when the old staircase is gone, the climb doesn’t disappear. It just gets handed down, one step at a time.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine →

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Until tomorrow, keep your eyes up and your heart steady—there are still good days ahead.

— Jack Reynolds