Terry DeMio

tdemio@enquirer.com

It was a love story a thousand times over: A bridge in Newport graced with padlocks placed along its railings by couples as a symbol of undying romantic attachment.

Some locks had dates and names etched into them; others, poetry. They were dubbed "love locks," and left for passersby to see. To envy.

But just as rapture can run thin over time, this love story is coming to an end.

Over the holidays, nearly all of the love locks from the Purple People Bridge were removed. The rest will go, too, in short order.

One might ask, in a love-starved world, why?

The little love gestures became a big eyesore, says Wally Pagan, president of the Newport Southbank Bridge Co., a nonprofit organization that manages and owns the Purple People Bridge.

Seems the padlocks tended to significantly increase the scrapes and scratches on the bridge and contribute to the problem of peeling paint on its railings and, if that wasn't enough, they are being blamed for the additional graffiti along the bridge that pedestrians and cyclists use to go between Kentucky and Ohio.

"It was cute at first," Pagan said Tuesday of the love locks. "It seemed like a nice thing to do. It got to be a huge problem."

So jail crews were called in to remove the offending gestures.

Pagan says he hopes that the bridge damage will be fixed and repainted by spring.

Along with the new paint, a new rule: Love locks no longer will be welcome on the Purple People Bridge.

"We decided to prohibit that from that point forward," Pagan said.

The gesture – it echoed a European, and particularly, Parisian, phenomenon – started some years ago when a mere sprinkling of locks began showing up on the bridge over the Ohio River. In spring 2014, Pagan said 59 padlocks were hanging on the bridge's structure.

But sometime between the 2014 count and now, love apparently exploded in the region, leaving behind a padlock profusion that Pagan said numbered too many to count.

"There were probably close to a thousand," Pagan said.

Even in Paris, the city of love, the practice was renounced with the cutting of about a million love locks in June from the Pont des Arts, aka "Love Lock," bridge. There, the reason was safety, in part. It was reported the bridge simply couldn't take the weight of the locks. Another reason given: the degradation of the heritage of Paris.

Newport Mayor Jerry Peluso was more philosophical than historical. It's quite likely, he said, that some of the padlocks belonged to couples who are, well, no longer couples.

On Tuesday, only a couple of padlocks remained firm in their resolve to commemorate togetherness. One, dated "9/20/2015," included a message that speaks to the meaning of them all:

"Together forever and never apart, maybe in distance but never in heart."

Even, the writer seems to say, if the lock fails.