Gustave Eiffel's hateful column of bolted iron has attracted more than 200 million visitors and celebrated its 120th birthday in March 2009. (EyesWideOpen/Getty Images)

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Eiffel Tower, a friendly four-legged Parisian structure that twinkled for 10 minutes each hour and generally reminded me of a giant, happy toy.

Given my impression of the tower, I was interested to find out that in 1887, when it was under construction, a group of prominent “writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate lovers of beauty” (yes, that’s what they called themselves) didn’t think it was toylike at all. In a manifesto letter, they vehemently protested the “useless, monstrous” structure “in the name of French taste,” calling it a “hateful column of bolted iron.” In fact, they even predicted that it would cast a hateful shadow on the city.

So, it’s kind of amusing that, 120 years later, this likeable iron creature attracts so many of the world’s travelers, who want nothing more than to embrace family, friends and lovers beneath its bronze-colored trunk. And even if you don’t like a bunch of tourists (or perhaps embraces), you can at least appreciate engineer Gustave Eiffel’s success at constructing an edifice that’s simultaneously solid and elegant — just as he promised the “passionate lovers of beauty” he would. In a retaliation statement to those iron-opposing folks, he said: “Are actual conditions of strength not always compatible with the hidden conditions of harmony?”

Harmony and strength — maybe they’re why, when we see that tower in the distance, we want to walk its way. 

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