DENVER — Next with Kyle Clark was on a mission to find out why a piece of Paris was sitting in a dirt lot in front of Mission Ballroom. The area of 42nd street and Wynkoop street is apparently the Paris of Denver.
“No, it’s completely out of place,” Beth Lakin, a resident of the apartment complex overlooking Denver’s Eiffel Tower, said.
“Very unromantic, un-Paris Eiffel Tower mini version right here,” Lakin said. “It’s just in the middle of a random lot that is full of gravel.”
“You can just tell everybody and lie to everyone and say you were in France for a day,” Julien Constantino, another nearby resident, said. “They need to put up some lights. They need to bring a little bit more France over here. Maybe have a cute little restaurant.”
Neither of them knew why the Paris landmark replica was in the dirt lot.
“Westfield, actually, had a tenant back in the mid-2000s that was an event décor production company and a vintage warehouse,” Ally Fredeen with Westfield Company, the developer of Mission Ballroom, said. “The only piece that actually sat out on Brighton Boulevard, pre-sidewalk days I should add, was this quirky Eiffel Tower.”
Fredeen knew the Eiffel Tower came from a warehouse that was being demolished to make way for Mission Ballroom.
“It began as a, sort of, treasure of a past tenant of ours in the event production business,” Fredeen said. “Westfield saw value in that Eiffel Tower and decided to make it our own.”
But, why was it in a warehouse?
After this story aired on Thursday, Next with Kyle Clark heard from viewers and readers who thought they knew the origin story.
One of those emails came from Heidi Waite.
“It was built by my father, Rene Hartmann, who opened up a European-style beauty salon in Cherry Creek in, I believe it was 1964," Waite said. “He had the Eiffel Tower built and put in the front of the shop.”
Her dad opened Salon Rene in 1964 at First Avenue and Cook Street in Cherry Creek.
It was very European style, so the Eiffel Tower, kind of, fits in with the European style," Waite said.
Hartmann was born in Switzerland but trained in the United Kingdom and France before moving to the United States and opening a salon in Denver.
“I played on it when I was little," Waite said. "My brother and I played on it when dad wasn’t watching."
She had a news clipping showing her dad standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. The clipping was about his effort to sell the replica.
“Hey, want to buy an Eiffel Tower? Rene’s got a great deal," Waite said as she read the headline.
He told the newspaper in 1974 that it was 24,000 pounds and 25-feet tall and that it cost $5,000.
He tried to sell it for $3,500 and told the paper that he had interest from Elitch's, a car dealer, three homeowners and a French cattle company in Wyoming.
The article said he was only seeking $500 when the story was printed.
A July 1985 article from the Aspen Daily News told the story of an Eiffel Tower owned by Roger Radke, who ran Creative Rentals, which rented out props and decorations. That article said Radke got the Eiffel Tower form Hartmann.
What happened in between is unclear.
"I often thought, wondered whatever happened to it? And there it is, sitting in an empty lot," Waite said.
“We were told it was some vestige of an old fabricator or welder or somebody on the block had put this thing up,” Keanan Stoner, CEO of Two Parts said. “We do a lot of different festivals and events.”
Stoner may not know the origin story, but he may know the Eiffel Tower replica the best.
“I’ve actually climbed up and down that thing probably 50 times because I was the guy who was entrusted to hang the cables for all the bistro lights that connected around the food park,” Stoner said.
When Mission Ballroom opened, Two Parts created a food and drink pop-up in the dirt lot outside the concert venue.
“We looked at it and thought, well, this thing might be kind of cool and noteworthy to add to the Wynkoop Alley pop-up that we were doing,” Stoner said. “So, we plopped it down in the middle of it and hung some lights off of it and, kind of, made it the centerpiece.”
“It definitely looks a little rusty,” Lakin said. “It’s clearly a conversation starter or maybe a conversation ender.”
The replica is rusted and bent. It is not a great representation of a symbol of love.
“I can’t speak for sure, but I think during the demolition the thing got a little bulldozed, a little beat up," Stoner said. "It had kind of been tossed behind one of the buildings. Before they knew that we might reuse it, I don’t think they handled it with quite as much care once we decided we wanted it.”
“The fact that she’s a little off is just a little reminiscent, but that’s relatable," Constantino said. "It gives her character.”
“There’s nothing French around here that I’m aware of," Lakin said. "There’s no croissants hanging around. There’s no French bakeries. It seems entirely out of place.”
Another Westfield executive suggested it might have come from a French department store that was the first of its kind in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Printemps opened its first U.S. store in Denver near Interstate 25 and Broadway in 1987. It closed in 1989. The building is now Quest Diagnostics.
The developer of Printemps passed away. One of his partners could not remember a miniature Eiffel Tower being a part of the department store.
“If anybody has any idea, we’d love to know too,” Fredeen said. “There’s enough people that have been around Denver long enough that are still here that may very well have some stories about that Eiffel Tower.”