Located on Hopkins Street near Zelicks Icehouse, the “Love Locks” sculpture invites the community to put a permanent piece of themselves in San Marcos. Like popular lock sculptures in Paris, France and Austin Texas, the love lock sculpture is intended to be a living and breathing piece of the city.
Leadership San Marcos is a two-year program that promotes community involvement and awareness. The graduating class of 2024, Brooke Spruiell, Heather Demere and Tiffany Harris, met at Leadership San Marcos and were the first class to graduate post-COVID-19. Leadership San Marcos requires a final project to graduate, and these women decided their project should reflect the love in the community.
Harris first started working as the coordinator for neighborhood enhancement in San Marcos and had done a similar program with Leadership New Braunfels. Shortly after, she joined Leadership San Marcos, believing it would be a great way to meet people in the community.
Harris, Spruiell and Demere are all not originally from San Marcos although they believe there is a surplus of information that even locals would be surprised to learn from attending Leadership San Marcos.
“The three of us did not know each other when we started this program,” Spruiell said. “It’s difficult to get in a room of people that you don’t really know, meet them, decide what you’re going to do together, work together, fundraise, implement a project.”
The sculpture was revealed in February at Zelick’s Icehouse. The graduating class marketed the unveiling as a Valentine’s gift, advertising love locks as gifts for loved ones.
“We thought it was an amazing location,” Harris said. “Part of the reason for wanting the sculpture is economic development to bring cool things to the city. It’s very visible. Visible to the students [and] to everybody else that lives here.”
Community sponsors raised roughly $35,000 for the project; anything raised over their initial goal was donated to the San Marcos Youth Council. The locks are sold for $30 each as a charitable donation to give back to the community. The project is continuing to raise funds for the San Marcos Youth Council; up to this point, it has raised an estimated few thousand dollars.
“It was one of the places that we toured in addition to the Hays County Women’s Center, and we felt like they had the greatest need for extra money to fix up the place and continue their programs,” Demere said.
The Love Locks sculpture is open to the public; anyone can purchase a lock and place it on it. The intent is for individuals to personalize their own locks with engravings so the sculpture is filled with pieces of the community.
“We wanted it to still be a living, breathing thing,” Spruiell said. “Hopefully it drives someone to come to San Marcos because they’ve heard of this.”
