According to The New Yorker, there is a lock picking contest going on in New York City that is resulting in some amazing "installations" of lock on public infrastructure. Almost like a street art sculpture effort.
The full article is here.
Here is the gist:
Over the past decade, “locksport”—the organized recreational picking
of locks by amateur enthusiasts—has become a thriving subculture.
Participants are, by definition, not professional locksmiths. This puts
what they do in a legal gray area that they are quick to discuss and
defend. In addition to nimble fingers and long attention spans,
locksport enthusiasts try to remain fluent in local burglary law.
All but simultaneously, the phenomenon of “love locks” has exploded:
padlocks with names, initials, or messages of love written on them,
clipped to pieces of urban infrastructure as a public sign of romantic
commitment. In some cases, the locks have been expensively laser-etched;
others are simply written on with Sharpie. “Carrina, will you marry
me?” “Zach + Julie, Always + Forever.” They are poetic, forming quite
beautiful, rose-like clusters—and they are doomed. In nearly all cases,
they will be clipped by the city and disposed of, their magic and
romance lost.
On a nearly cloudless Saturday afternoon in
September, recreational lock pickers met halfway across the Brooklyn
Bridge to help save its hundreds of love locks. The plan was to remove
as many as possible before the city’s cleaning crews could clip them,
store them in red, Valentine’s Day-colored nylon bags, and, eventually,
reattach each lock onto a public-art sculpture, a specially made “tree”
to which all future love locks will be latched. They call this “love
picking.”
