A piece of the Eiffel Tower’s original staircase is heading to auction in Paris, turning one of the world’s most familiar landmarks into a collectible object with a price tag to match.
Artcurial will offer the 14-step section on May 21, with an estimate of $140,000 to $175,000. The lot measures nearly nine feet tall and more than five feet across, and it comes from the spiral staircase that once connected the tower’s second and third levels. Installed for the Eiffel Tower’s debut at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the staircase remained in use for nearly a century before being removed in 1983, when elevators replaced the climb.
According to the auction house, the section has stayed in the same private collection for more than 40 years and was recently restored ahead of the sale. Roughly 20 staircase sections were taken out at the time of dismantling, and many later entered private hands. That dispersal has helped turn the tower’s original fabric into a market category of its own, with fragments now held by institutions and collectors in Paris and beyond.
The appetite for such material is not theoretical. In 2016, another staircase segment sold for $612,000, a result that underscored how strongly buyers respond to objects tied to iconic architecture. Around 7 million people visit the Eiffel Tower each year, and an estimated 300 million have made the trip since it opened. For the buyer, the appeal is less about climbing the monument than owning a trace of its history — a rare physical remnant of a structure that has long belonged to the global imagination.
