Love is many things: patient, kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, etc., etc., you get the point, you’ve heard it all before. But authorities claim that love is also prohibitively heavy and a giant menace, especially when it comes in lock form and is running wild all over major metropolitan cities. You may recall the Pont des Arts in Paris, the bridge so decorated with declarations of eternal affection that it inevitably began to collapse beneath the weight of them. Authorities removed 45 tons of love locks from the bridge in June, but young paramours have not let up with their bonded pronouncements — and have since begun spreading their love elsewhere.
The city of Paris itself is plagued by an estimated 1.5 million locks still, adorning not just the Pont des Arts (again), but the Eiffel Tower and 11 other bridges. Taking inspiration from the beautiful lock-landed city of Paris, the trend has popped up in places all over the world, too. The Brooklyn Bridge had them, Vancouver has them, a small town in Scotland called South Queensferry even encourages them. In most places, when the locks are added to structures at lovers’ whims, they can do infrastructural damage to the cities and it’s starting to piss people off.
The NYC Transportation Department had to remove 9,363 locks from the Brooklyn Bridge this year alone as they were causing damage to a beloved landmark. Lisa Anselmo, a co-founder of nolovelocks.com, told the New York Times that “the problem is too big to control or contain.” That sounds just like love, am I right?
