Facelift for grand old lady of Paris

Press, 9 March 1982, Page 21

Facelift for grand old lady of Paris

From

SUSAN ROBERTS,

in Paris

The "grand old lady” of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, is having a face-lift. About 1000 tonnes of excess weight are being cut off the 10,000-tonne monument, its rusting joints are being renewed and its elevator system improved in an effort to breathe new life into its image. The new Eiffel Tower Company (S.N.T.E.) which was recently granted control of the tower by the Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, is putting up $33 million to finance the operation. The president of the company. Bernard Rocher, is enthusiastic about the plans and their eventual effects. "The tower is more than an attraction and certainly not only a machine to hoist people into the air,” he said. “The tower is a symbol of the civilization of iron . . . built in the material that man considered as one of the realities of his domination over matter.”

The 93-year-old tower has come to symbolise Paris, a city that predates it by thousands of years. Three million visitors, the vast majority tourists, are hauled up 320 metres to the top every year.

Seventy-five per cent of the tower’s visitors are foreigners, 20 per cent come from the provinces and only five per cent are Parisians. Most are exhilarated by the panoramic view of Paris while others complain about the long queues for the lifts to the top and what they call the mediocre quality of the two restaurants and the tower’s antiquated facilites.

But controversy has plagued the tower ever since it was completed in 1889. Its designer, Gustave Eiffel, won an architectural competition for an iron building to commemorate

the centenary of the French Revolution and the modernistic lines of his prize-winning entry immediately incensed France’s aesthetes. “Turn back driver. It’s hideous, hateful and ignoble,” cried the poet Paul Verlaine when he first saw it. Now no attempt to attract the Frenchmen who steer clear of the tower, the S.N.T.E. plans to restore it to its original role as a monument to science and technology. The first step was to cut the tower’s weight and reduce the pressure on its 10.000 tonnes of rusting metal. Eiffel planned the first of the tower’s three landings to support a weight of 250 kilograms per square metre (51.20 pounds per square foot). But today it has to support more than 400 kilograms per square metre because of alterations and additions over the years to the main structure of the tower, and the concrete platform of the first floor is being replaced by light welded steel. A more dramatic visual change for the visitor will be the new lifts. The tower’s lifts, which had been invented only 30 years before it was completed, were one of its main attractions for its first visitors. The old hydraulic elevator carrying visitors between the second and top floors, which was unusable in winter because the water working it froze, is to be replaced by two new two-cabin elevators.

These can carry 1800 people to the top of the tower every hour. The present lifts can carry only half that number. The new lifts should be operating by June 1983 but will not go faster than 3.5

metres per second so as not to cause any "unnecessary shivers,” according to Mr Rocher. For increased safety, the use of gas is being banned from the tower and the fire prevention and alarm systems are being modernised. The tower’s two restaurants are also being mod-

ernised and will offer “two quite different choices.” In earlier modifications, the tower’s third floor was encased in glass and safety barriers erected to stop suicides. More than 300 people have jumped to their deaths from the tower. (NZPAReuter)