Please Don't Put "Locks of Love" on the Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge is part of any Brooklyn tour: it's a treasure, for residents and for visitors. It's a legacy of 19th century ingenuity (and hardship), and it remains vital infrastructure that requires money and effort to maintain. 

So there's no reason--other than selfishness--to mar this awesome, venerable, and precarious piece of public property with "locks of love," a trend that has plagued Rome and Paris (and other world cities) in the past decade. Paris even has a group called "No Love Locks," which has helped get officials to remove locks and make bridges lock-proof.

"Just a month ago, we had an overhead wire that people had hung so many locks to that it snapped under the weight,” Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg told CBS, which noted that last year the city had to remove 11,000 locks, which cost $116,000.

So, if you want to memorialize your unbreakable love, please don't mar the Brooklyn Bridge with a lock, or even a lighter piece of fabric. It will just have to be cut off by the Department of Transportation and tossed in a landfill. And now there's a $100 fine and signs warning "No Locks. Yes Lox."

As Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tweeted, "If we care about preserving the #BrooklynBridge for another 133 years, we'll heed @NYC_DOT's call and lock hands or lips, not #lovelocks."​