A building constructed from salvaged pieces of Paris’s original Eiffel Tower restaurant is now for sale on St. Charles Avenue, carrying an asking price of more than $2.8 million and no legal protection that would stop a buyer from tearing it down. The 12,500-square-foot property at 2040 St. Charles Avenue hit the market on September 29, and its zoning would allow a new owner to build a five-story hotel or apartment building without special permission.
The listing, first reported by NOLA.com, frames the property as what broker Parke McEnery calls a site with the best zoning in uptown. The marketing materials, posted by McEnery Co., describe it as offering investors a highly visible commercial location suitable for numerous end uses, from a professional office or creative workplace to a museum, cultural institution or other special-purpose operation. The building sits at the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Josephine Street along the historic streetcar line, and its listed price works out to roughly $225 per square foot.
What makes the property unusual is what it is made of. The building was constructed around pieces of a restaurant removed from the actual Eiffel Tower in Paris in the 1980s, and the structure itself has had at least six uses since it opened to the public in 1986, per the seed reporting.
From a Paris Icon to a St. Charles Avenue Oddity
Le Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel opened in Paris in 1937, but by 1981 it was removed and dismantled, its roughly 11,000 pieces packed up after French authorities forbade the businessman who acquired it from using the Tour Eiffel name. New Orleans developer McDonald Stephens bought the dismantled restaurant for more than $500,000 in 1983, planning to reassemble it on land his family leased from the Mahorner family across St. Charles Avenue from the Pontchartrain Hotel. Development partners John Onorio and Daniel Bonnot, a French-born chef, helped raise money to finish the roughly $3.3 million project after Stephens died in 1984, when the building was only 70 percent complete, according to libn.com…