Despite Rumors, Not Everything That Towers Is Eiffel’s
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Version 0 of 1. AREQUIPA, Peru — The locals here call it the Iron Bridge, a narrow, graceful span across the Chili River with pale green garlic fields below and the cleft-topped Misti volcano rising above it in the distance. Travel books, tour guides and residents all proudly point to the bridge, a fluent expression of the Industrial Revolution, as the work of Gustave Eiffel, the 19th-century French engineer who built the Eiffel Tower and designed the iron skeleton inside the Statue of Liberty. Except that it is not. And neither are a great many other bridges and buildings around Peru and the rest of South America that are popularly attributed to the famous Frenchman. “Anything made of metal in South America, people say it is by Eiffel,” said Darci Gutiérrez, a professor of architecture in Arequipa, Peru’s second-largest city, who has spent years debunking what she calls the Eiffel myth. The myth does have a grain of fact to it. As a young man, years before his tower for the 1889 Paris World’s Fair made him famous, Eiffel ran a growing engineering business in France, designing buildings and bridges for clients around the world and shipping the structures in prefabricated iron pieces, to be assembled on the site like an Erector set. French bankers encouraged him to seek opportunities in Peru, a country that was growing rich from exports of guano fertilizer, but did not yet have the necessary foundries or technical expertise for state-of-the-art iron construction. Eiffel sent a representative in 1871. His company missed out on a lucrative contract to develop Peru’s main seaport in Callao, but Eiffel was chosen for at least two projects in southern Peru, which was rebuilding after the devastating earthquake of 1868 — a church in Tacna, and a customs house and pier in Arica, which is now part of Chile. The South American venture didn’t last long, though. According to Eiffel’s French biographer, Bertrand Lemoine, Eiffel’s representative died in 1873. The company apparently had no projects on the continent after that, though it went ahead with those already underway. That much is history, built of stone and brick and iron and supported by documents tucked away in archives. But it is also where the myth begins. In Arequipa, known as the White City for the color of the stone used in many of its colonial-era buildings, the myth persists despite clear evidence against it. In addition, many people here believe that Eiffel designed and built a railway station and the bustling San Camilo market — attribution that a leading historian of the city, Eusebio Quiroz, said “has no basis in fact.” The urge to attribute buildings and bridges to Eiffel may be rooted in a longstanding tendency in South America to equate Europe, and France in particular, with sophistication and modernity, which got a further boost after the Paris World’s Fair. “In that moment, France seemed like the height of progress,” Mr. Quiroz said. The San Camilo market, with tall iron columns supporting a corrugated metal roof, was actually built in the 20th century by a local company, years after Eiffel had left his engineering firm. The train station and the bridge are older, but they were put up by the American entrepreneur Henry Meiggs, who built the Southern Railway, among other projects in Peru. The bridge — now used for a single lane of car traffic, with pedestrian walkways on either side — was erected around 1870. It is a latticework of iron struts and posts that these days are painted blue. It is easy to imagine the bridge as the work of the Eiffel Tower’s creator, but the structure itself reveals its true origin. Forged into its supports are the words “Phoenix Iron Co. Philada.” Phoenix was a Pennsylvania company that specialized in railroad bridges, and Philada is short for Philadelphia. Professor Gutiérrez said that the bridge closely matched others built by Phoenix, and that there was no evidence of any Eiffel connection with either the company or the bridge. And yet many Arequipa residents, known as Arequipeños, choose to believe in a more illustrious pedigree. “This bridge was built by the guy who built the Eiffel Tower,” said Lucio González, 60, a farmer whose small stone house is directly under the span. Mr. González said that life there was generally quiet, though the bridge is often the site of suicides. “They come here because it’s a famous bridge, and they jump into the river,” he said. Professor Gutiérrez said research by she and other investigators had also raised questions about Eiffel’s supposed connection to a number of other structures in Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela and other countries, including the Iron House in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, which she said bore little or no resemblance to other Eiffel creations. “The system of construction is different,” she said. “All you have to do is look at them to know they’re not by him.” Even in the few cases where Eiffel’s involvement is undisputed, the story can be far from simple. For the church in Tacna, surviving documents and photos show that Eiffel was given a contract to build it, that iron columns and other pieces arrived, and that two stone bell towers for the church were partly erected. But the work stopped in 1879 when war broke out between Peru and Bolivia, on one side, and Chile on the other. The Chileans seized Tacna and did not relinquish it to Peru until 1929. By the time work on the church restarted in the 1950s, Eiffel’s plans had been lost or forgotten, and a new design was drawn up. Chile also seized the scruffy port of Arica, a short drive from Tacna, and kept it when the boundary with Peru was redrawn after the war. In an indication that ill will lingers more than a century later, a highway sign on the Chilean side of the border warns: “Danger — Land Mines.” Here, Professor Gutiérrez said, historical documents show that the red and white brick customs house, now used as a cultural center, was indeed designed and built by Eiffel’s company before the war. But she has raised questions about the city’s most acclaimed architectural landmark, the Church of San Marcos. A brass plaque says the church, made almost entirely of iron, is a national monument, and declares that it was built by Eiffel in 1875. Mr. Lemoine, the biographer, said that though a photograph of the church apparently appears among Mr. Eiffel’s records, evidence for the attribution was inconclusive. Professor Gutiérrez found documents in Peruvian archives that cast the Eiffel link into doubt. Those records say the church was shipped in prefabricated pieces from the United States, and that a “master workman” was sent from there to supervise its assembly. Half of his salary would be paid in New York, the documents say. Because the church was built around the same time as the customs house, she said, local people may have come to believe that it, too, was created by the Frenchman. Patricio Letelier, 41, an architect who walked past the San Marcos church on a recent afternoon, said that the church’s unusual all-iron construction would make it an important and valuable building with or without the Eiffel association. “The form of the church, the Gothic style, is still interesting,” he said. |