A building constructed from salvaged pieces of Paris's original Eiffel Tower restaurant is now for sale on St. Charles Avenue, carrying an asking price of more than $2.8 million and no legal protection that would stop a buyer from tearing it down. The 12,500-square-foot property at 2040 St. Charles Avenue hit the market on September 29, and its zoning would allow a new owner to build a five-story hotel or apartment building without special permission.
The listing, first reported by NOLA.com, frames the property as what broker Parke McEnery calls a site with the best zoning in uptown. The marketing materials, posted by McEnery Co., describe it as offering investors a highly visible commercial location suitable for numerous end uses, from a professional office or creative workplace to a museum, cultural institution or other special-purpose operation. The building sits at the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Josephine Street along the historic streetcar line, and its listed price works out to roughly $225 per square foot.
What makes the property unusual is what it is made of. The building was constructed around pieces of a restaurant removed from the actual Eiffel Tower in Paris in the 1980s, and the structure itself has had at least six uses since it opened to the public in 1986, per the seed reporting.
From a Paris Icon to a St. Charles Avenue Oddity
Le Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel opened in Paris in 1937, but by 1981 it was removed and dismantled, its roughly 11,000 pieces packed up after French authorities forbade the businessman who acquired it from using the Tour Eiffel name. New Orleans developer McDonald Stephens bought the dismantled restaurant for more than $500,000 in 1983, planning to reassemble it on land his family leased from the Mahorner family across St. Charles Avenue from the Pontchartrain Hotel. Development partners John Onorio and Daniel Bonnot, a French-born chef, helped raise money to finish the roughly $3.3 million project after Stephens died in 1984, when the building was only 70 percent complete, according to libn.com.
New Orleans architect Steven Bingler designed a steel-and-glass frame around the salvaged walls, and Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel became the first business to open at the address in 1986. It closed within three years and filed for bankruptcy, and the building and its contents sold at auction for $154,000 in 1992. The Pontchartrain Hotel then leased the space and used it as a banquet hall through 1997, before John Spradlin opened the Red Room, a dinner and dance club that reportedly hosted a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser attended by Al Gore.
A String of Reinventions and a Pandemic Closure
After the Red Room closed in the early 2000s, the building sat vacant until the New Orleans Culinary Institute turned it into the Cricket Club banquet hall. It later operated as Eiffel Society, an art-filled event space, from 2010 until 2020, when it closed during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Current owners Ann Mahorner and Elizabeth Mahorner Landis have held the property through much of that turnover.
NieuxCo has leased the building since 2021, running the Nieux Society, a club of entrepreneurs, artists and civic leaders with more than 1,000 members. The group uses the space for dinners, salons and retreats, and also rents it out for public meetings under the Nieux brand. In 2023, NieuxCo released plans to build a public speakeasy beneath the kitchen and a patio facing the avenue.
Lease Ends in January, Tenant Looks Elsewhere
NieuxCo's lease ends in January, and the owners will not be extending it. The lease had included an option to buy the building with owner financing, but NieuxCo declined, since the option price exceeded the current asking price. The group has scheduled events through January and is now searching for a smaller-scale space, with founder Tim Williamson saying he hopes to announce a new location in the first quarter of 2027.
Williamson described the building as magical and said it is special to New Orleans and New Orleanians. He expects NieuxCo will post its best-ever quarter and turn a profit by the end of 2026 even as it prepares to leave the space behind.
Demolition Risk Without Legal Protection
The site lacks legal protection against demolition, and current zoning allows a five-story hotel or apartment building without special permission — meaning a buyer could legally replace the structure rather than preserve it. If kept intact, the building could instead serve as an event venue, office space, or a museum or nonprofit, according to the marketing listing, which notes that future uses remain subject to applicable approvals. Existing features include a full bar and commercial kitchen with an open floor plan, a performance stage, audiovisual systems, high-speed fiber internet, an ADA-compliant elevator, and 30 gated off-street parking spaces. The building itself sits raised 16 feet above street level.
Part of a Broader Wave of Change on the Avenue
The potential sale lands amid a period of redevelopment pressure along lower St. Charles Avenue, which continues to attract investment even as some projects struggle. As of June 2025, two new hotel projects were under construction on the lower avenue, including a planned six-story boutique hotel at 1923 St. Charles Avenue with 58 rooms and a ground-floor restaurant, and a five-story hybrid hotel project at 1304 St. Charles Avenue projected to cost $4 million, according to reporting from NOLA.com. That same reporting noted that redevelopment efforts along the corridor have produced mixed results, hampered by higher interest rates, rising insurance costs, and increasing construction labor and material expenses.
Demolition has already reshaped other stretches of the avenue. The long-vacant former K&B drug store building at St. Charles and Louisiana avenues, built in the mid-20th century, was torn down in 2023 after the Besthoff family, which owned the site, announced plans for a roughly 200,000-square-foot mixed-use apartment and retail complex, according to the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. Whether a similar fate awaits the Eiffel Tower building remains unknown; no buyer, replacement project or demolition plan has been identified for 2040 St. Charles Avenue.
