The Eiffel Tower was originally supposed to be in Barcelona, but the
city thought it would be an eyesore, and rejected Gustave Eiffel's
plans. That meant he was forced to repitch the project elsewhere.
Luckily, Eiffel found a home for his idea in Paris, where the Tower
could serve as the main archway for the 1889 International Exposition.
The Tower didn't exactly go over well with the Parisians, either. The
enormous iron structure was immediately belittled by critics, and one
especially harsh reviewer
referred to the thing as a "metal asparagus."
The writer Guy de Maupassant had similar feelings. He famously
patronized a restaurant inside the Tower because it was the one place he
wouldn't have to look at the building.
Truth be told, the Eiffel Tower wasn't supposed to stay up for very
long. In fact, it was offered for sale as scrap, and was only spared
because it proved useful to the French army. (They found that its
984-foot height worked nicely as a communications tower.) Thankfully,
Gustave Eiffel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad structure has
managed to endure.
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