Pont des Arts
Paris, France
As the first metal bridge in Paris the Pont des Arts had spanned the River Seine at its scenic location for over two hundred years by the time its side panels were replaced with lock-proof glass. Well, perhaps it was not that exact bridge that spanned the river there, but one very much like it, when it began to attract padlocks in the early 2000s. The Pont des Arts bridge (and its replacement, built in the early 1980s) stood for two centuries by the time that love locks, as some called them, began dangling from the iconic bridge's metal side panels in great numbers sometime around 2008. Couples in love had taken up the idea of writing, or engraving, their names on padlocks that they would lock to the bridge's metalwork and then toss the key into the water as a symbol of their enduring love.
Napolean I ordered a pedestrian bridge at the site connecting the College des Quatre-Nations (now the Institut de France) on the Left Bank and the central square of the Palais de Louvre directly across. The year was 1801 and the nation's designers and artisans had discovered the beauty and durability of iron, and so the first metal bridge in France was constructed at the location. Called the Passarele des Arts or Pont des Arts, the bridge was designed to serve foot traffic only, and was a toll bridge in its early days that cost one sou to pass across. In one early version the bridge was to resemble a garden, with trees, flower plantings, and benches adorning the scenic passageway over the river.
With the passage of decades, damages accrued on the old bridge, from bombs during the World Wars to barge collisions as larger ships plied the river. Over the years the old bridge structure weakened enough that one sixty-foot section suffered a collapse in 1979. The city commissioned a reconstruction, and the designer followed the original plans in rebuilding the metal bridge, although decreasing its arches from nine to seven for the new bridge and aligning it with Pont Neuf. The bridge reopened in 1984.
The bridge stood as a beloved photographic destination and the pedestrian passageway between the Left Bank and the art museums of the Louvre for another quarter century or so when it caught a viral trend that had been going around on social media: the love lock. Some trace the tradition to locations in Asia where attaching locks to metal fences and bridges has long been popular.
The idea apparently grew as it developed and spread on social media in Russia, and so the locks came to the City of Lights around 2008. The trend was confirmed as a thing by two characters in a 2013 movie, Now You See Me, and soon couples by the thousands began to get a lock with their names engraved (often from helpful, but illegal, vendors who have sprung up around the area to serve the market of couples in need of locks). They then attach their personal lock to the ironwork of the bridge (if there is space among tens of thousands of others) and toss the key into the Seine as a marker of their love.
The city and many locals decried the growing trend of locking down bits of the bridge with symbols of someone else's love as the love lock collection grew wildly out of control -- numbering hundreds of thousands in a few years and collectively weighing many tons. A parapet of the bridge collapsed under the weight of the thousands of locks, and the city began replacing metal mesh side panels with experimental glass panels, which had no place to accept the locks as the metal mesh of the original bridge design had.
The city has continued to look for solutions and to encourage visitors to document their love with selfies rather than by leaving behind a chunk of metal on the Pont des Arts bridge or elsewhere around Paris. Perhaps, as the original design intended, gardens might grace the edges of the bridge, and couples in love could plant a flower to mark their romance.