Love on the Brooklyn Bridge

Brrr. I crossed the Brrooklyn Bridge on the coldest day in living history. It was minus 20 something Celsius with the wind chill factor and a very long way indeed from summery Seffrica. Fortunately I am hardy and was prepared. Leather boots, thermals, a fake fur hat and coat (my Welkom mink as my friend Kate calls it), and a full length Uzzi black leather jacket. Looking like a Russian whore, I ventured across New York’s famous suspension bridge with wild snowy views of Manhattan and Brooklyn and a great happiness in my heart. Bridges are inherently romantic structures aren’t they? 

There were only about three other stupid, frozen, excited tourists crossing the Brooklyn Bridget that day and what an advantage it was. We pretty much had the whole bridge to ourselves. As my nose froze and the snowflakes fell it was so enchanting and I felt like a character in some old black-and-white movie romance, and I did a graceful twirl, considering my outfit, and my tears also froze.

The Russian whore look 

I talked to myself and sang and read the graffiti and the billboards and stickers, a surreal urban narrative as I went along: I’m from Brooklyn it’s that way. Eat plants and train hard. Cunt ripping death metal. I live for moments of random pleasure. General Confusion. Too weird to live, to rare to die. I was here. Buy Art not cocaine…

And I loved all the padlocks attached to just about every part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hundreds of padlocks engraved or painted with the names and initials of lovers. I wished desperately I had a padlock for my lover and I. But he was in the middle of the Pacific and I was the only living girl in New York. And I didn’t have a padlock on me and sure as hell wasn’t going to buy one at the current rand-dollar exchange rate from some extortionist vendor on the Manhattan side. So I shouted out his name instead and thought again about how romantic bridges are and how love can cure just about everything except poverty and toothache, as Mae West once said. 

I got to see the Brooklyn Bridge up close and personal and later when I was in post-bridge bliss, and was finally able to use my frozen fingers again, I drank whisky and did an online trawl and found out that these lovelocks as they’re known began appearing on the Brooklyn Bridge in the late 90s. And then in 2006 the tradition suddenly went befok across the world because of a teen novel turned international literary sensation.

Italian writer Federico Moccia’s 2006 novel Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You) featured a young couple attaching a lock to Rome’s Milvian Bridge as a sign of their eternal love. The thousands of sweethearts imitating the brooding young Romans in the book were among its 2.5 million readers “and that is why padlocks are now appearing on bridges right around the world, including Brooklyn Bridge” the author told the UK Guardian. And if you up for some gritty urban romance read the fascinating piece called Love in the Time of Padlocks: Has a Craze on the World’s Bridges Gone Too Far? in National Geographic online.