A reader kindly forwarded me an article published this week in the Huffington Post, contributed by a Condé Nast Traveler writer, with titled “There Is A Secret Apartment At The Top Of The Eiffel Tower” (sic re capitalization).
Misleading and full of errors, it makes it sound as if Gustave’s Eiffel’s apartment still exists (there’s nothing left but the office; the actual living quarters were transformed into the mechanical room for the radio and TV antennae), and that the remaining office with the wax figures of Eiffel and his daughter were just reopened to the public (they have always been visible through the glass windows on the top floor).
The source was not the official Eiffel Tower website or any news source, but the blog Atlas Obscura, which itself used four other blogs posting in 2012 and 2013 (they seem to have edited their post since the Condé Nast article came out). And of course this poorly researched click-bait has gone viral, copied by supposedly “reliable” publications such as Condé Nast Traveler.
This is why you should only trust primary sources of news and information, not “journalists” who are just copying other amateur blog posts. Rant over.
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