One of the people who helped bring the icon back to life has strong ties to North Carolina.
Dr. Caroline Bruzelius taught at Duke University for many decades. The architectural historian has been captivated for most of her life by her field of study.
"The building can't speak for itself. That the task of someone like me, an architectural historian, is to tell the story of the building," she told ABC11. "More than 50 years of going up and down walls and trying to unravel stories that are not documented by texts."
Medieval buildings present an intriguing challenge to Bruzelius, with limited or sometimes nonexistent records - and no way to know who built them or how.
"It's detective work, you have to look at the walls and figure out what happened and how it happened and how it was made," she said.
It was while she was living in Paris in the late 1970s that she first started studying the famed Notre Dame cathedral up close as she noticed crews were cleaning it.
"I asked for permission to climb up that scaffolding and as it moved gradually in vertical slices from east to west, I went up over and over and over again. I was measuring stones, I was recording molding profiles. I was looking for clues in the walls about how that building was made," Bruzelius said.
She published her findings eight years later - a study that has held up well over time.
Then, in 2019, a fire ripped through the iconic structure she'd grown to know so well.
"I was horrified and I was frightened because it was not clear whether the building would survive if they could stop the fire in time. If they could keep the flying buttresses from pushing in and therefore the vaults collapsing everywhere," she said.
Though the damage was extensive, it could have been worse. The structure was salvageable.
Bruzelius worked specifically on the team that restored stone and mortar. She said it was not only a chance to bring the cathedral back to life, but it was also a chance to learn about its history in a way we never have before -- especially with new technology.
"They've been able to date the wood, they've been able to localize the origin of the limestone and even the origin of the forests from which the timber had been taken from on the roof that burned," she said.
After five long years of painstaking work, Notre Dame finally welcomed back visitors this past weekend - to a site no one has seen in almost 800 years.
"Most people who go to Notre Dame, who went to it before the fire, will remember a building that was quite dark, quite dark and a little bit gloomy, but now when you see the beautiful new stone revealed again right after the cleaning, it's spectacular," Bruzelius said. "Right now you see it as it was when it was finished around 1250, beautiful, creamy Parisian limestone that over the centuries had been covered with all sorts of dirt and soot and so on. So, now it's fresh, it's clean and it's bright and it looks the way it should look."
Though it's back open, Bruzelius is waiting a few months before going to see it, waiting for the first rush of new visitors to end.
"It will be really fun to see it without the scaffolding. The whole thing opened up again because that scaffolding really was like a forest of metal. On the inside of the building. So this is yes, it will be great to see it," she said. "I urge everybody to buy a ticket, go to Paris, see the cathedral, and see it soon while it's still so beautifully fresh and clean."
Her love for buildings and the people who've designed them remains as strong as ever.
"Architecture is this beautiful environmental and ubiquitous phenomenon that we're as a culture so unconscious of, I've been really grateful to have stumbled into this as my lifelong profession, and I've had such a very good time doing it," Bruzelius said.
To learn more about the re-opening of Notre Dame, click here.