A closer look
Parisians originally despised the Eiffel Tower so much that they aggressively petitioned to have it torn down, calling it a gigantic black smokestack that ruined their elegant skyline. Constructed entirely of puddle iron for the 1889 World's Fair, Gustave Eiffel's three-hundred-meter masterpiece was explicitly designed to be a completely temporary installation that would be dismantled and sold for scrap metal after just twenty years. The only reason it survived the wrecking ball was its sudden strategic value as a massive radio transmission antenna, proving incredibly useful for military communications during the First World War. Today, it is the most-visited paid monument in the entire world, generating millions of euros in revenue and serving as the ultimate cliché backdrop for thousands of unoriginal marriage proposals every single evening. It perfectly illustrates the classic architectural lifecycle where locals fiercely hate a new structure until it becomes too expensive to demolish
