Wednesday, October 29, 2014

South American Buildings Attributed to Eiffel




New York Times
29 October 2014


By WILLIAM NEUMAN

AREQUIPA, Peru — The locals here call it the Iron Bridge, a narrow, graceful span across the Chili River with pale green garlic fields below and the cleft-topped Misti volcano rising above it in the distance. Travel books, tour guides and residents all proudly point to the bridge, a fluent expression of the Industrial Revolution, as the work of Gustave Eiffel, the 19th-century French engineer who built the Eiffel Tower and designed the iron skeleton inside the Statue of Liberty.

Except that it is not. And neither are a great many other bridges and buildings around Peru and the rest of South America that are popularly attributed to the famous Frenchman. […]