A.G. Gancarski
Tuesday, we wrote about a situation that aggrieved certain residents of Jacksonville’s urban core, in which “love locks” put on a fence on Jacksonville’s Northbank by individuals to demonstrate romantic or other types of love were removed by a city worker because the area supervisor considered them to be blight.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Alvin Brown‘s Communications Director Dave DeCamp let me know a solution was being worked out to allow people inclined to put up these locks.
“When I run the Riverwalk, I run past” the locks, said DeCamp, who added that “people,” including him, “think they’re kind of neat.”
DeCamp contends that the employee who took them down did so with the “best of intentions,” but with an incomplete understanding of their significance or what they contribute to the area and the engagement people have with it.
We want to “make people think we live in a cool city,” he said, adding that the city is working on this and “other features of park engagement.”
“We want the Riverwalk to be fun,” he said. “Locks can go up here.”
A positive resolution to what seems to have been a miscommunication has emerged.
