Community miffed with love messages on wall
Print Edition
A COMMUNITY in Hongkou District plans to step up vigilance against graffiti on a “wall of love poems.”
The wall on the 500-meter-long Tian’ai road, which means Sweet Love, has 28 marble plaques of verses by famous poets — both in Chinese and English — inscribed on them. For that reason, the wall is popular with lovers, many of whom scribble their own notes of love on the wall that locals say are an eye soar.
The road is also known for its unusual mailbox. Letters and postcards dropped in the box are sent with its own unique heart shape postage stamp.
The Sichuan Road N. Community, under whose jurisdiction the wall falls, says it is forced to keep aside a big sum of money to remove the graffiti.
The graffiti are mainly declarations of love scribbled in black and red inks, or worse, carved on the marble plaques. Almost all the 28 plaques are ruined by drawings and inscriptions on them. The wall, made of red bricks, are also plastered with graffiti.
On the first plaque that tells the history of the road, someone had scribbled: “I think Chen is the most beautiful woman in the world.” His partner had added: “I think Wang is the world’s most handsome man.”
Even the mailbox has not been spared with someone scribbling a date: “2012.01.01, Together Forever.”
Passersby have complained about the menace of graffiti, some of them written in English or just plain drawings of Cupid hearts. “The wall is spoiled by graffiti and cleaners spend long time trying to remove them,” a resident, surnamed Zhu, said yesterday. “It gets worse especially during the Valentine’s Day,” he said.
A community official said the inks on the stone plates can be hard to remove and repeated polishing of them makes them thin. There are local volunteers who patrol the road, but people come at midnight or later and scribble on the wall.
The community did offer a space for graffiti but it filled up soon and people started writing on the wall near it. It was promptly removed.
“The government can set up a place for couples to hang locks which is a more civilized way to express their love,” said Zheng Shiling, director of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Space of Shanghai at Tongji University.
But a passerby surnamed Liu said she likes to check the wall for new graffiti every day because “the words are sweet and interesting.”
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