A 14-step piece of the Eiffel Tower’s spiral staircase was sold for 274,475 euros ($ 328,427) in Paris on Tuesday, almost ten times the target price, the auction house Artcurial said.
The almost three-meter-high artifact was part of the original staircase from 1889 that connected the monument’s second and third floors for almost a century before an elevator was installed in 1983.
The stairs were taken down and cut up into 24 pieces.
Twenty pieces were sold to private collections, three were donated to French museums and the last was exhibited on the first floor of the Paris landmark called Iron Lady.
Today, parts of the stairs are next to the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Yoshii Foundation in Japan.
The piece sold on Tuesday by a Canadian art collector was expected to fetch between 30,000 and 40,000 euros, but a European collection knocked out 274,475 euros ($ 328,427) for a piece of the original tower.
The price was not a record for part of the stairs, with a sale on Artcurial 2016 triggering a bidding that ended at 523,800 euros.
The 324-meter Eiffel Tower was built by engineer Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.
Slightly loved by Parisians at the time, it has since become a much-loved emblem in the French capital.
(AFP)
