If you tie your garbage to the Brooklyn Bridge you should be thrown off the bridge

I am a patient man. I try to understand the varied perspectives of others and see beauty in all things. But this only goes so far and now I must say: if you tie your fucking garbage to the Brooklyn Bridge you should be thrown off the bridge.

Last week, after explaining to the mayor what a "sneckdown" is, I decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to work, as it was cold, but not that cold. I encountered the above fence full of plastic bags, hair ties, wristbands, napkins (napkins!) all blowing in the cold wind, a horrible stain on one of the city's most iconic structures. There's no excuse for this kind of behavior, no cutesy New York City tourism bullshit that you can point to as proof for why you should be adding to the collection of literal garbage accumulating on the bridge. And that is why, as a solutions-oriented person, I am suggesting the way that we deal with this is allowing New Yorkers to get a license to chain whip anyone they find tying garbage to the Brooklyn Bridge.

There is of course the question of why this is happening at all. What's inspired legions of people to come visit and vandalize a work of art. My theory here is that this is an outgrowth of the same disease that spawned love locks, which you also see on parts of the bridge, though you see blessedly fewer of them than you did back in the go-go aughts.

Love locks, for the uninitiated, are padlocks on which people write their own name and their beloved's name and then lock to a bridge. Originating in Paris, the disease spread to New York at some point. The locks themselves were actually damaging and corroding pieces of the bridges they were attached to, and sometimes even falling onto cars going 40 miles per hour, which led the Department of Transportation to demand people stop doing that and led me to becoming one of the premier haters of the practice to the point where I was quoted in the newspaper about it.

The theory is backed up by some old reporting from the Wall Street Journal, in which the paper found that tourists who wanted to put love locks on the Brooklyn Bridge but didn't have a lock just tied any old fucking garbage to this icon of the city and happily gawked at their vandalism like grinning apes. The Department of Transportation asked people to stop doing this shit back then, and they continue to ask people not to do this today, though I want to emphasize that no one at the department is endorsing my specific ideas for punishing this behavior.

"The iconic Brooklyn Bridge has been called 'America's Eiffel Tower,' and cluttering it with debris detracts from the enjoyment of everyone who uses the bridge and burdens the hard-working crews who maintain this historic landmark," agency spokesperson Scott Gastel told The Groove.

But our failure to do anything about it twelve years ago is why it continues today and why in this blogger's learned opinion, the matter of the chain whipping and bridge pushing needs to become official city policy.

I want people to understand that this is the compromise solution. That when I raised this issue to Tim and Virginia in The New York Groove Slack and suggested my first couple of ideas (one of which involved letting the Sanitation Police throw offenders into garbage truck trash compactors) I was told I was too harsh. So if our mayor, who reads The New York Groove, decides this is something worth pursuing, offenders should consider themselves lucky that they are only being hit with a bike chain or pushed off the bridge into the East River. It could, and I contend it should, go even worse for them.

Perhaps people think I'm being a little extreme. Well I don't think I am. The Brooklyn Bridge isn't just an architectural and engineering marvel or a stunning piece of limestone and suspension cables or even a symbol of New York City. The Brooklyn Bridge is a physical feat that created New York City. Not literally, of course. But the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, uniting the hearts and hands of the cities of New York and Brooklyn, which paved the way for the consolidation of the city in 1898.

Building the bridge freed thousands from the shackles of the ferryman, whose service couldn't get past frozen ice (a problem we still have today), opening up opportunities for travel and trade and real estate in ways that people dreamed of but that no one but crazy ol' John Augustus Roebling could actually deliver on.

At least 20 men, maybe more, died building this bridge. Roebling's own son, Washington, got permanent damage from a case of the bends while working on it and Roebling's wife Emily became chief engineer in everything but name in his place. These men suffered and died, and Emily Roebling smashed through barriers, in service of building a structure the world had never seen before, a gateway to a city that would change the world. They did not suffer and die and pioneer so some dipshit from Peoria or Milan or Sydney could fly here and deface this monument with literal fucking garbage.

After my mid-aughts rants about love locks, I didn't think for one second that a worse, even more unsightly tourist practice would develop in the wake of love locks, but now it has. And not only does it look like shit, but it's also a way to have more garbage blown into the river that will then flow into the ocean, a billion new bits of microplastic headed to the great garbage patch in the sea, all for something that looks like maximalist pigeon shit.

So let it be known: if you interrupt your walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to tie your hand warmer package around some of the fencing, the next thing you may experience is the heavy metal weight of justice on the side of your neck.