Scores helped to clean up the city
197 projects benefited by Boston Shines
As yesterday's afternoon sun beat down on a vacant lot along Dudley Street in Roxbury, Liz Miranda traipsed through the ankle-high weeds, collected the discarded alcohol bottles and plastic bags, and enjoyed every minute of it.
"This is important," said Miranda, a 27-year-old lifelong Roxbury resident, with rake in hand. "A beautiful community is a happy community."
According to the city's Office of Neighborhood Services, yesterday's effort included 197 projects, 216 groups, and an estimated 5,000 or more people.
Miranda was one of the volunteers who fanned out across the city yesterday raking, shoveling, planting, and weeding, during Boston Shines, a citywide clean-up effort started by Mayor Thomas M. Menino in 2002.
The volunteers, including neighborhood residents, community leaders, high school and college students, and local business employees, worked to clean up dozens of sites around the city, from East Boston to West Roxbury.
"It's important to put the best face of Boston forward," said Menino, greeting volunteers along Dudley Street. Menino used tools and cut weeds from the lot and posed for pictures with some of the volunteers. "They're taking the grime out of the vacant lots. These aren't city workers, but thousands of neighbors that do this."
All along Dudley Street, nearly 100 volunteers could be seen in white shirts and work gloves, and carrying handfuls of litter and weeds to trash bags. The volunteers were scattered along Dudley Street for blocks at various empty lots that needed cleaning. Some of the lots that required cleaning were owned by the city, while others were future building sites where construction company crews also pitched in to help clean.
Officials from the MBTA, which owns and operates large amounts of property throughout the city, said yesterday they conducted a spring cleanup event for employees on the agency's property last year. A repeat event is scheduled to take place in May, said Lydia Rivera, a T spokeswoman, but she said she didn't know the exact date.
Volunteers in Roxbury said they mostly found empty beer or liquor bottles discarded among the weeds. They said that removing the waste was rewarding.
"My kids go to school in the area," said Sofia Santos, a Roxbury resident who was part of a team from
Teams of volunteers were dispatched to littered areas close to their neighborhood starting at 9 a.m. The volunteers' duties varied depending on the neighborhood.
Near the Fort Point Channel in South Boston, neighborhood residents cleared debris from tree beds that lined A Street and spread new brown mulch around the trunks.
"The wonderful thing about this is that there are artists her, there are new residents here, people that have a lot of money and people that don't," said Cam Sawzin, a 3-year resident of the neighborhood and an interim board member of the Fort Point Neighborhood Association, which helped organize the group clean-up effort.
About two dozen residents from the Fort Point neighborhood lined A Street and swept and shoveled litter and debris into the street just ahead of a street sweeper that picked up the waste.
"I think this neighborhood has so much potential to be a vibrant part of the city," said Dan Palese, a resident of the neighborhood who helped remove trash from A Street with his family . "For someone like me with a family, what's important is the green space and not only to clean it up, but to show that there are people living here."
