Okay, so we met. Last week.
You know—the invitation I extended to you to meet at Panificio on Charles Street at nine a.m. on July 28 to talk about our neighborhoods.
Beacon Hill and the Back Bay were represented. I didn’t really expect a Charlestown or North End resident since it’s a bit of a walk for them. Guess what we talked about:
Trash.
It appears that Boston’s dirt and grime is still foremost in everyone’s mind. It was that way in the 1920s, according to the Beacon Hill Civic Association’s archives.
We tried to analyze why trash, dirt and grime so afflict this city.
We agreed that it is worse in the densest neighborhoods—Beacon Hill, the North End and Chinatown. But it is also a problem in the Back Bay along the alleys, where the trash is kept. But everyone agreed that the Back Bay was cleaner than other neighborhoods along its sidewalks.
One participant wondered what visitors think when they are trying to walk around trash bags that have been poked by rats or the bottle and can collectors so much that their contents are strewn about. We talked about how the frequent trash pickups add to the problem, since trash is on the sidewalks legally for almost half the hours in any week.
We hoped that the green ticket law, where building owners get slapped with a lien if they and their tenants don’t comply with trash regulations, will relieve us of the problem somewhat. But we weren’t optimistic.
I’ll have to commend the city for towing cars so the mechanical street cleaner can do its job. It has made a world of difference in reducing the trash and the grime that fuses under the cars along the curb. I cheer the tow trucks when they come down my street, and they have to do it a lot less than two years ago when drivers were still getting used to being towed.
We agreed that one of the problems was business owners. A couple of the attendees had lived in European cities. They described shopkeepers there as being embarrassed if the curb and sidewalk in front of their shops wasn’t clean and tidy. Not so here. Shopkeepers were seen as contributing to the problem by expecting the city to do all the cleaning.
“Why don’t they go out every so often and pick up the trash around their shop?” one participant asked.
I’ve felt that bare tree pits also contribute to the feeling of neglect and grime. Along Cambridge Street 250 Cambridge Street and the Hill Tavern are the most noticeable scofflaws since they occupy a long stretch that looks shabby. The tree pits need fences around them, and they need flowers planted in them. It looks as if these two entities simply don’t care about the neighborhood they are in.
But tree pits on other streets of the city are also ignored. If you’ve got a tree pit, and you’re a resident or a business, you should count yourself lucky to have such an entity and take care of it properly so that it contributes to our lives rather than adding to the grime.
Surprisingly for a city, no one was much concerned about crime. One woman said that morning she had walked past a car with a smashed window on the drivers’ side, and she mentioned a murder of a homeless man on the Common, but none of us could remember when that took place. We agreed that we feel safe almost all of the time.
The Back Bay still has a problem with aggressive street people, said one participant, but the Beacon Hill residents agreed that except for a few stalwart beggars on predictable corners, the number of people who looked as if they might be homeless had diminished.
We solved no problems. We just got to know one another. And in any neighborhood, that’s the best. I think I’ll propose another gathering in a few months.
Trash is like the hands on a clock, it , trash, keeps coming around every 24 hours ,365 days a year, so keep cleaning
up and down ! Trash will always be a hot topic!
Thanks John Forger Oldeforgerealty Boston, Ma.