Village Trivia
I came across this innocuous padlock on the guardrail of a pedestrian bridge in the Village, but it seemed strangely out of place. Why is it there? Who would put it there? Do you know what it is, and where it is? Scroll down for the answer!
Photo by Brian J. Pape, AIA.
Answer to Village Trivia
Finding abandoned padlocks on public bridges has a long history. The lock in the first Village Trivia photo is located near Pier 45 near Christopher Street. When I spoke to the Hudson River Park staff about how they handle them, I was informed that their maintenance crew regularly cuts them off. But why do people put them there in the first place? Just to confirm their ubiquity, I went over to the Manhattan Bridge and got the second photo, with three locks in one area of railings.
LOCKS ATTACHED to the Manhattan Bridge. Photo credit: Brian J. Pape, AIA.
The history of so-called “Love Locks” and the superstitions behind them were easily found in Wikipedia. A love lock or love padlock is a padlock that a couple locks to a bridge, fence, gate, monument, or similar public fixture to symbolize their love. Typically the sweethearts’ names or initials are inscribed on the padlock, and its key is thrown away (often into the river) to symbolize unbreakable love.
A 2014 New York Times item reported that the history of love padlocks dates back at least 100 years to a melancholic Serbian tale of World War I, with an attribution for the bridge in the spa town of Vrnjačka Banja. A local schoolmistress named Nada fell in love with a Serbian officer named Relja. After they committed to each other, Relja went to war in Greece, where he fell in love with a local woman from Corfu. Nada never recovered from that devastating blow and she died due to heartbreak from her unfortunate love. Young women from Vrnjačka Banja wanted to protect their own loves, so they started affixing padlocks to the railings of the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet.
Love padlocks proliferating on the Pont des Arts in Paris. Photo credit: Disdero via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.
In the rest of Europe, love padlocks started appearing in the early 2000s (that’s almost a century later!) as a ritual. But the locks are heavy and there is a potential of damage to the bridge. I personally witnessed love padlocks proliferating on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On June 1, 2015, the locks were taken down due to the collapsing of the bridge.
The message is clear: this is a damaging, ineffective superstition – DON’T DO IT!
