Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated where the Eiffel Tower will go after the U.S. Olympics Trials. No decision has been made.The French took more than two years to build the Eiffel Tower. But in just a few weeks this spring, dozens of Hoosiers built their own.
A much smaller Eiffel Tower now stands on Georgia Street and South Capitol Avenue, welcoming visitors and attendees to the Olympic swimming trials at Lucas Oil Stadium. This tower is much smaller than the original, measuring seven stories high and weighing a mere 18,000 pounds.
As hundreds of swimmers prepared to descend on Indianapolis for the trials that start this weekend, local welders, engineers and sheet-metal suppliers raced to finish a project that some say might have otherwise taken years to complete.
“I saw this as a really crazy experiment,” said Brian Hull, owner and founder of Maker Factory and an engineer on the project, which was sponsored by Indiana Sports Corp.
“It was a great opportunity to bring some of the most talented Hoosiers in engineering and construction together to make a monumental thing happen right downtown.”
Why Indy has an Eiffel Tower
The Indiana Sports Corp. formed a committee to create a project that would capture the spirit of both Central Indiana and the Paris Olympics.
They settled on a miniature Eiffel Tower.
“They were trying to make a connection or a relationship with Paris with this project,” Hull said. “I was reading it like an art piece.”
Most of the original design ideas proposed towers emblazoned with the Indy logo or other Hoosier-related themes, but the committee eventually settled on a simple design identical to the tower’s Parisian inspiration, only smaller with no stairs or elevator.
How to build an Eiffel Tower
The Latinas Welding Guild, a local non-profit that provides underprivileged communities with industry certifications, were commissioned to do most of the work.
Once the tower’s appearance was settled, the hard part began: Engineering it so it would stay upright. Hull designed an intricate digital model of the tower that specified every measurement down to the shapes of the connections between beams.
The original design for the tower was only 50 feet tall, but the engineers realized that would make it too easy to climb, so they increased the size of the trusses so the tower grew to 66 and eventually 70 feet.“To me, it seems like a small building at this point,” Hull said. “It’s not really the scale that a sculpture would be.”
The engineers divided the Indy Eiffel Tower into multiple sections separated by giant metal plates, allowing three different construction firms to work on it simultaneously. Then, workers assembled the sections like a colossal French Lego set.
F.A. Wilhelm Construction constructed the bottom, Poynter Sheet Metal the middle and the Latinas Welding Guild the top. Construction took just a few weeks, as the teams raced to finish. Collaboration was key.
“There were just tremendous deadlines that were probably unrealistic,” Hull said. “If one person doesn’t hit a deadline, then it can’t go to the next one, or the next, and it holds everybody up.“
Inside the Latinas Welding Guild
The Latinas Welding Guild has a small workshop compared to larger companies. They’re a teaching facility, so between small booths used for student practice are boxes full of scrap welding projects.
At one point, employees from Poynter came to visit the workshop, said Conseulo Lockhart, the Guild’s founder and executive director, because they and the guild were constructing identical legs of the tower.
“They came in and they were like, ‘Where’s your crane?’ They didn’t understand how we were able to do the same projects without the same equipment they would have,” Lockhart said. “We’re all really scrappy. I was telling them when they were here, ‘I’ve done more with less.’”
The Guild team double- and triple-checked that they had all the parts. Then, it was time to weld. Welders used welding guns to shoot molten steel wires across a seam, linking two large metal beams together, said Tito Calderon, a welder and fabricator. Completing the tower involved about 10,000 welds, each of which takes a couple of minutes to do.
Meanwhile, at Wilhelm, employees worked through a weekend to dry assemble the tower’s base. The Wilhelm team encountered a small problem. The pieces in the base of the tower didn’t quite line up, leaving gaps in the seams. The team discussed custom-bending the pieces to fit, but time was running out. Instead, they filled the gaps with weld.
Still, Hull said the structure is sturdy.
“As long as you get the proper weld on there, it’s all going to be stronger than you can imagine,” Hull said. “One square inch of weld can hold 20,000 pounds.”
A little Paris on Georgia Street
At the Guild, one completed piece of the tower nearly reached the 18-foot ceiling. Calderon and his colleagues proved that even with the larger trusses, one could still climb from beam to beam.
When the Guild finished their biggest chunk of the Eiffel Tower, they faced a fresh challenge: Getting it out of the building without a crane. They flipped the vertical piece sideways.
“It barely fit through the door,” Calderon said. “We had some forklifts on both ends and then we kind of had one (going backwards) in neutral and then the other one was pushing. It was kind of sketchy, but we got it out of there and up in the air.”
Then, there was nothing to do but wait for Wilhelm workers to install the tower.
Can you climb Indy’s Eiffel Tower?
As of Monday morning, the Indy Eiffel Tower stands deceptively short against the Indiana Convention Center.
The structure is strictly off limits for climbers. There will be 24-hour security in front of it to ensure that no one attempts to scale or damage it.
About 20 people have already inquired about getting married under it, according to Lockhart. Indiana Sports Corp has received several proposals for where the tower should go after the trials but a final decision has not been made.
Now that the Indy team has proved it can do this, Lockhart said the town of Paris, Illinois, has reportedly requested its own miniature Eiffel Tower.
“I feel like a lot of people were doubting that we were even going to have the capability of doing this,” Calderon said. “But we all came together as a team and really, really showed up.”
Alex Haddon is a Pulliam Fellow. You can email her at AHaddon@gannett.com.
