Paris Locks (SSR)

People all over the world have heard stories about Paris:the city of love. It’s inevitable; the phrase is in an astounding number of movies and is now a part of our everyday vocabulary. As the city of love, it’s not that surprising that Paris has an equally famous slew of activities geared towards lovers. One of these traditions is the act of putting a padlock on a bridge and throwing away the key. This symbol of being ‘locked in love forever’ is now up for debate. The Parisian city officials have decided to experiment with removing the padlocked bridges and replacing them with glass panes.

The most popular bridge for this act is the Pont de Arts. It is estimated that on any one of the panels on this bridge there are 700,000+ padlocks weighing about 500kg total. That’s a lot of love. That’s a lot of people who were willing to show that love, and it’s about to be destroyed. As a person who has never been in love and lives on a different continent I can only imagine this bridge. I can only imagine what people must be thinking when they’re hunting for a spot to put a padlock among thousands of other padlocks. That commitment is impressive to say the least. Even if it only lasts a little while, that feeling will forever be remembered in one location.

How would you feel if that thing that you loved more than anything was being taken away? Maybe it’s not the most ‘aesthetically pleasing’ practice out there, and maybe they’re a ‘bad excuse for tourism’, but these padlocks are also a part of Paris’ legacy. It would be like going to Hollywood and ripping out every cement block that had hand/foot prints in it. Or going to Buckingham Palace and taking out the guard just because they don’t actual serve their true purpose anymore. The locks on Parisian bridges aren’t as old of a tradition as either of these things, but they are still a tradition. Perhaps the locks have become just as much of the bridge as those hand prints have become to sidewalks in Hollywood. It’s something that adds charm and gives a place that aura that keeps drawing people in. That aura that people remember forever.

These padlocks are the type of thing that you could come back to in 20 years and it will still look the way it did when you were there. There might be more padlocks, and there might be different people and scenery, but that moment of standing before hundreds of padlocks is still there. This is a monument that people can visit forever. After all, isn’t that the true purpose of a monument?