Mood Swings: February 2022

The other morning on my Google feed I found an article about the Old Red Bridge, which I wouldn’t have thought at all interesting except it is a love lock bridge. And it is in – what, this can’t be right – Kansas City? That’s less than five miles from where I live.

The first time I heard about “love locks” bridges was during my trip to Paris five years ago. The Pont des Arts or Passerelle des Arts is a pedestrian bridge in Paris which crosses the River Seine. It links the Institut de France and the central square (cour carrée) of the Palais du Louvre. For years, lovers come to the bridge and profess their undying love by locking a padlock to the bridge, sometimes with their names engraved, sometimes with other poetic messages. Then they would throw the key into the River Seine. Unfortunately because over 700,000 locks have been secured to the bridge, with an additional 7,500 every year, the bridge cannot handle the weight. So in 2015, the grilles were removed and replaced with glass panels so locks couldn’t be attached. When I was there, metal grilles were again in place but separate from the structural part of the bridge.

My picture looks rather forlorn as I seemed to have captured a day when love was just not in the air. At one time, sections of grille and boxes of locks were auctioned off, so even if your lock no longer appears on the bridge, it may be out in the universe somewhere standing guard over someone else’s love, or perhaps it has been melted down to become part of another artist’s representation of love.

Although Paris is known as the city of love, it is not actually the origin of this loving tradition. The first notion of love locks appeared in a poem titled “Prayer for Love” by Desanka Maksimovic, a Serbian poet. The poem takes place before the First World War and is about a soldier and young woman who were madly in love and secretly met every night at the Most Ljubavi Bridge in a town called Vrnjačka Banja. When the young soldier was sent off to Greece, he eventually met the love of his life. When his first love found out, she died of heartbreak. Out of superstition, local women started hanging love locks on that same bridge, the Bridge of Love, in an attempt to safeguard their love.

The popularity of love locking really took off after the release of the Italian movie “Ho Voglia di Te” (I want you) in 2007. It was inspired by the same-named novel from Italian author Federico Moccia, which was published in 2006. One scene features the protagonists locking their love by attaching a padlock to a lamppost at the Ponte Milvo in Rome and throwing the key into the Tiber River.

I began to think there had to be more to the tradition than just these two incidents – a poem and a story, so I researched and found a link to twenty love lock bridges, of which not all are actual bridges. 20 Love Locks Bridges Around the World (brides.com) Some are sculptures, others are trees and yes, some are bridges. They all appear to be inspired by the original poem or movie. There are other internet sites that list numerous places in the United States with love lock bridges, sculptures and places of tradition, none of which have much of a history, except perhaps for the people who live there. Places like Loveland, CO use the idea as a promotion of its town and name.

But what I did not find was information on the one particular love lock bridge that had appeared on my Google feed just this morning – Old Red Bridge, in my own back yard. So back to the original reason for my research. Although the original Red Bridge was built in 1859 by a Scottsman, it was wood and was replaced twice over the years. Then in 2011, the New Red Bridge opened, so the previous one became called the Old Red Bridge (because they are both painted red, of course). It was designated as a love locks bridge in 2013, so it’s “history” isn’t even as old as that of many others around the country. One significant difference is that after locking in their everlasting love to some appropriate spot on the bridge, people are requested to put their keys in a designated box instead of throwing them into the Blue River. The metal from the keys is bad for the environment, especially the fish. Instead, these keys will be used by the organization Monarchs on the Move to create a sculpture of the iconic Monarch Butterfly that travels through Kansas City on its amazing multi-generational migration. That’s a rather romantic notion, don’t you think?