The weight of love is becoming unbearable for this city’s bridges.
Concerned for its safety, Paris city hall workers will begin on Monday to cut off the thousands of padlocks adorning the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine, in a bid to draw a line under a popular trend that has led to tourists blanketing many of the city’s bridges with apparent symbols of love.
“It is a catastrophe for the bridge,” said city hall spokeswoman Barbara Atlan. “We need to preserve the heritage”.
Paris’s picturesque bridges are heaving with padlocks, bike locks, handcuffs and other talismans of amour. Enamored visitors write their names on a lock, attach it to a bridge and throw the key into the river. The trend took hold first on the Pont des Arts, but it has quickly spread to any bridge tourists can get a lock on.
The habit has become part of the Paris tourist trail, along with climbing the Eiffel Tower, taking a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and walking down the Champs Élysées. But it has sparked rancor among many locals, dismayed at the defacing of the city’s treasured bridges and evolved from being a charming way for couples to show their love to a nuisance for the city’s authorities, who have threatened in the past to outlaw the locks.
On the Pont des Arts, the city hall estimates the weight of a three-meter grate panel with its padlocks at 500 kilograms and there are 112 such fences on the bridge, said Ms. Atlan. The weight represents four times the load limit allowed on the bridge. (...)
The lovelock phenomenon has been tracked to an Italian teen novel titled “I Want You” published in 2006, featuring two Roman lovers who immortalized their bond on a bridge and threw the key in the Tiber. Padlocks have since sprouted in other cities around the world, but nowhere appears to have embraced the trend as much as Paris, a town rich in romantic symbolism.
by Inti Landauro, WSJ | Read more:
Concerned for its safety, Paris city hall workers will begin on Monday to cut off the thousands of padlocks adorning the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine, in a bid to draw a line under a popular trend that has led to tourists blanketing many of the city’s bridges with apparent symbols of love.
“It is a catastrophe for the bridge,” said city hall spokeswoman Barbara Atlan. “We need to preserve the heritage”.Paris’s picturesque bridges are heaving with padlocks, bike locks, handcuffs and other talismans of amour. Enamored visitors write their names on a lock, attach it to a bridge and throw the key into the river. The trend took hold first on the Pont des Arts, but it has quickly spread to any bridge tourists can get a lock on.
The habit has become part of the Paris tourist trail, along with climbing the Eiffel Tower, taking a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and walking down the Champs Élysées. But it has sparked rancor among many locals, dismayed at the defacing of the city’s treasured bridges and evolved from being a charming way for couples to show their love to a nuisance for the city’s authorities, who have threatened in the past to outlaw the locks.
On the Pont des Arts, the city hall estimates the weight of a three-meter grate panel with its padlocks at 500 kilograms and there are 112 such fences on the bridge, said Ms. Atlan. The weight represents four times the load limit allowed on the bridge. (...)
The lovelock phenomenon has been tracked to an Italian teen novel titled “I Want You” published in 2006, featuring two Roman lovers who immortalized their bond on a bridge and threw the key in the Tiber. Padlocks have since sprouted in other cities around the world, but nowhere appears to have embraced the trend as much as Paris, a town rich in romantic symbolism.
by Inti Landauro, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia
