As Mike Cass and I toured the city’s "dirty dozen" sites last Saturday during Keep Springfield Beautiful‘s citywide cleanup, we passed a work crew of inmates from the Hampden County Correctional Center as they purged trash from Rifle Street and the adjacent bank along the city’s Mill River.
The changes in appearance were immediate and striking. Passing through later, we saw black garbage bags strewn along the shoulder, awaiting pickup by the DPW toward the end of what was surely a long day for them as well as all the volunteers who had done the collecting.
Close to 10:15 am, we then headed over to 12-14 Noel Street (pictured above and below), a two-family on a corner lot with rear frontage on the Mill River at the intersection of Rifle and Hancock Streets.
A small crew from D&R Contractors had been there since 8:00 am cleaning the steep, badly-littered riverbank as well as the junk piled all around the property. A dumpster in the driveway sat full of all the stuff collected. One of the crew members talked about how the sheriff’s cleanup crew had paid a visit to the property and pitched in to the cleaning effort.
Cass was thrilled with the results and lavished praise on the work crew while they grinned and asked where to head next. We walked around to the back of the property to have a look at the rushing water and clean riverbank. Tire tracks from the Bobcat the crew used were evident in the grass.
The crew pointed out the dilapidated garage, which was stuffed to the gills with junk. "We’re not gonna touch that," one of them said. If there is a Pandora’s Box of trashed garages, this would be it. The garage itself is trashed, rotting and falling apart. Pictures of the house speak for themselves.
On our way out, Cass stopped by the shoulder on Rifle Street just to capture a picture of the clean riverbank, which was utterly transformed that day. "We got rid of the guy’s fence, but too bad," he said.
Next we took I-91 over to Chestnut Middle School in Brightwood, one of the city’s four staging areas. Captain Mary Ayala was there and exuberantly told me about the massive food donation and preparation effort that had been underway the day before. More volunteers were buzzing around here than we had seen at Rebecca Johnson School in McKnight a while earlier, and the food was more plentiful.
The McKnight staging area had not received coffee or donuts by the time we visited, but in Brightwood there were boxes full of donuts going uneaten. We grabbed lunch for the D&R crew Cass had just visited and had sent to another trashed property not far away on Walnut Street.
Just before we left Chestnut, we ran into a cleanup volunteer we had seen earlier at the scene in Mallory Village in East Springfield (pictured). We watched as someone drove up and dropped her off, and she explained that for some reason, coordinators at the Brightwood staging area had directed her—alone—to go there and help out. She thought more people were coming, but then they had disappeared. At that point, Cass had suggested that she get in the car with us, because city crews were doing the big hauling with bucket loaders and Bobcats, and neighborhood residents were simply bringing out their trash and bulk items from home. She was reluctant to follow the advice, though, because she believed the person who dropped her off would return.
As it happened, that person didn’t return to get her. After waiting a while, she called her husband to come and pick her up after she realized there was nothing for her to do.
The massive coordination on Saturday was praiseworthy, but some individuals’ volunteer efforts appeared to get lost in the shuffle like this, and they were left feeling pretty discouraged. My sense is that those who had already formed their own teams and were determined to clean a particular spot had a much more rewarding experience, without needing the guidance of others to tell them where to go. The whole thing was a huge endeavor and, as with the Mallory Village events that unfolded early, a learning experience.
Listen to a podcast chronicling some of this portion of the day’s adventure with Cass, in which we visit the D&R crew at 12-14 Noel Street and then drop by the Brightwood staging area.
