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A few years ago, the city put up a chain-link fence on the Vista Bridge to deter suicides. Over time, a lot of people attached padlocks to the fence for whatever reason. Now those locks have been removed. Was this a safety thing, or just for aesthetics? —Bernie C.
Those weren't just any locks, Bernie—those were "love locks." The idea is that you and your significant other write your names on a padlock, lock it to some immovable object, and throw away the key, the better to emphasize the prisonlike nature of romantic entanglements.
Love locks are a worldwide phenomenon, though they seem to be considerably bigger in Europe than they are here in the States. Leave it to Portland sweethearts, however, to put a continental spin on their declarations of affection—carving your initials in a tree is so 2007.
The locks are so popular in France that a bridge in Paris partially collapsed a few months ago under their weight (much as the relationships themselves would later collapse under the weight of not being in Paris anymore).
The Vista Bridge lock cluster hadn't reached that point, but city policy is that all things affixed to a public fence—padlocks, signs, Earth First protesters—are considered graffiti and have to go.
Given that romance is little more than a competition between two parasitic wasps to see who's going to lay their eggs in whom (I can't understand why no one's replying to my OkCupid profile), it's hard to get too upset about this. Still, I suppose some might see it as a buzzkill.
They regularly remove the locks. "Each lock will not express eternal love longer than about a week if attached to city property," notes the Bureau of Transportation's Diane Dulken. In 90 percent of cases, one imagines, this interval is sufficient.
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