Portions of the spiral staircase that originally connected the two top-most floors of Paris’s Eiffel Tower are scattered among museums and private collections around the world. As of this week, there’s one planted in public, amid a newly constructed community in Susquehanna Township, Pa.
H. Ralph Vartan, CEO of Vartan Group, has been eager to debut this relic in the heart of his firm’s latest development, Susquehanna Union Green, since he started planning the mixed-use project 12 years ago.
With a little help from Vartan’s uncle, his late father had purchased the Eiffel Tower staircase shortly after 1983, when it was disassembled, portioned out, and sold to make room for an elevator. Vartan Sr.’s siblings were born as his family fled Armenia. Vartan Sr. himself came to America on a college scholarship, “with the proverbial $5 in his pocket,” his son told me. He founded Vartan Group in 1975, wrote poetry in five languages, and collected artists including Armenian Lebanese painter Paul Guiragossian and Russian romantic painter Ivan Konstantin Aivazovsky.
Over the phone, Vartan called the staircase’s value “a trade secret.” Other pieces perennially hit the block, however, and sell for hundreds of thousands.
The segment in the square. Image: Vartan Group.
Vartan’s edition will lend a pop of yellow Susquehanna Union Green’s town square. Most people only know the Eiffel Tower’s eponymous brown hue, which it has sported since 1968. But, the tower was a bright, rust-resistant Venetian red when it unveiled in 1889—and it was just repainted a more golden-brown this year to honor the Summer Olympics.
Gustave Eiffel himself recommended repainting the Eiffel Tower every seven years, and purportedly preferred brown with yellow overtones. That influenced Vartan’s decision to have his portion of the spiral staircase painted ochre-yellow, which, in 1892, became the second of six total colors the tower has sported over its lifetime.
Gustave Eiffel on the steps of the completed Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, 1889. Photo: General Photographic Agency / Getty Images.
The surrounding area won’t just offer homes and apartments. Vartan Group has constructed an entire town—including commercial/retail spaces like a neighborhood grocer and hotel, alongside ample public space, and pedestrian paths connecting them all. The project falls under the purview of Traditional Neighborhood Design, a predecessor to New Urbanism that rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. This school of thought states that in to order ensure the best quality of life, residential neighborhoods should mimic 20th-century villages.
Several such developments have been built throughout the surrounding Harrisburg area over the past 15 years, like Walden and Legacy Park. Rather than letting communities arise naturally, Vartan said it has become “best practice” to build a neighborhood out on the front end to facilitate connection, leisure, and opportunity. When it’s quiet, these spaces can be a little creepy, like ghost towns that never got a chance. But life has a way of creeping in, and whether it’s a pilates studio on a Saturday morning or a brewery on a Friday night, the adage that seems to hold true in such communities is ”build it and they will come.” In many ways, it’s a beautiful thing.
A segment of the Eiffel Tower staircase in Pennsylvania. Image: Vartan Group.
Some of these all-encompassing residential neighborhoods, however—like the ones mentioned—omit public art, particularly of the historically significant kind. Not Susquehanna Union Green.
“The intent of this public monument was to create a connection between our community and the greatness of the human spirit,” Vartan told me. “Over time, it will develop its own identity in the community’s consciousness, like a new home that gets ‘lived in.’”