Bill Dusty of The New England Rogue Journal posted yesterday part two of his three-part series, "A Springfield Story." This one focuses on neighborhoods, and includes a number of Dusty’s photos from a few different parts of the city. At the very beginning, in paragraph two, he takes a look at my own neighborhood. From the article:
Witness the Forest Park neighborhood between the "X" business district and the South End neighborhood to the north. It is an odd mix of well-maintained, tree-lined avenues with beautiful houses and well-manicured lawns on the one hand, while at the very next street over, absentee landlord-owned multi-family houses lay largely neglected by both their owners and their renter-occupants. Fences are broken down, trash swirls about the streets, and lawns are unkept and overgrown.
Dusty’s right, it is an odd mix indeed. The chaos of the litter, the blight, the heavy auto traffic of commuters zooming through, graffiti on traffic signs and other surfaces, run-down, weed-covered fences, and vacant homes and storefronts make this neighborhood downright frightening to walk through sometimes. But it’s home.
The area of Forest Park where I live does border along some historic districts, which tend to look nicer. But there is sometimes a fortress mentality for those districts: rather than expanding what could be a nicely kept-up neighborhood, there is more of a pressing need to protect the nice area from becoming worse. As Dusty points out, there are plenty of areas in Springfield without nice houses and lawns to speak of, but instead with "practically no middle class support structure at all." It seems to me that neighborhoods of mixed-income are a good thing, and the more integrated they are, the better kept-up they begin to appear. Where residents are working on this deliberately, it makes a difference; all the same, as some residents have joked, "What’s the point of making sure everyone’s grooming their lawn when there’s an active crack house on your street?"
Loose trash and "swirling litter," as Dusty calls it, may not really be the most important thing to worry about in Springfield, but I can say that it affects me on a daily basis, and I must not be the only one. It’s very discouraging. The push-and-pull between whether or not to bother picking it up trash is a regular concern. Some long-time residents may have this down to a science, but not me. I’m more likely to photograph the litter than to pick it up. On my daily walks to school with my kids, we pass a lot of trash. Should I walk by with a trash bag and do pick-up? Maybe so. This week, one of my sons picked up a discarded set of fake vampire teeth from the sidewalk, remarked on it, thankfully didn’t put it into his mouth, and then tossed it back on the sidewalk.
I was surprised to hear myself not saying anything to stop him. Have I caved?
Trash problems are a sanitation issue, as well as a statement of our collective self-esteem. In his piece on Springfield, Dusty points out how piled-up trash in dumpsters ends up getting picked up by the wind instead of the DPW, scattering on the street, and "vagrants are digging through garbage in search of bottles and other useful treasures, leaving opened trash bags and tossed litter as they go." It’s also the case that residents may not know how to handle their trash. A neighbor on my street routinely leaves cardboard out in a way that prevents the DPW from being able to pick it up, and this morning’s trash left out for pick-up included an opened and spilled bag on the ground, with litter from it all around and traveling into neighbors’ yards. What is an appropriate response to this? Just get out there and clean it all up?
After the DPW had passed through, the bag was still there, along with the scattered trash. It gradually becomes evident that this mess is just par for the course for the DPW. Sometimes the residents come out and pick it up, if they care. Sometimes they don’t. Usually, if the place is owner-occupied, the residents are more likely to care. If the owners live in Tampa, Florida, why then they have no idea this is going on anyway.
At the same time, this complaint is so minor, compared to other problems across the city with blight, crime, abandoned properties and so forth, that one begins to wonder if it’s even worth mentioning. This is the kind of peculiar imbalance residents might find themselves in, many of them having picked up and left the city already. Residents who want to clean up the city, make their streets, homes and lawns look better, and gradually improve their neighborhoods, need a sense of teamwork and, dare I say it, hope.
Maybe I really will start carrying a trash bag with me on my walks to the school. The hope has to start somewhere, and I don’t think I want to watch my son toss trash on the ground anymore, even if it was already there to begin with.
