I may have to explain this photo a little.
You can see in the background some of the more than 620 folks who showed up on April 25, 2009 to clean up Merino Park, Riverside Park, and the Fred Lippitt Bike Path Woonasquatucket River Greenway in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence. They all got yellow shirts, worked hard for three or four hours, and were waiting for a bite to eat at the cookout that followed the cleanup when I took this photo.
And there in the middle of the photo is one of the Providence Parks Department trucks with yet another load of trash the volunteers gathered that day, headed for a large dumpster. Some neighborhood and Americorps volunteers worked this part of the cleanup.
But the reason I like this photo so much is that on the bike path, walking toward the park and playground, are about 15 parents and children from the neighborhood who can now walk to a well-kept park.
There's more work to do, though. You can see the dilapidated Atlantic Mill building in the background, and there's another run-down building that may be a Boys' and Girls' Club some day. So Olneyville has more volunteer projects to make this place more and more usable and enjoyable. Saturday, May 16, the focus will be on cleaning up the surrounding streets to the park, and a playground build day is scheduled for June 13.
I talked with a Providence resident who lives near the Dexter Training Ground in the Armory District about the West Broadway Neighborhood Association's cleanup of that park, also on April 25. WBNA has had cleanup days there for 25 years, and she said that each year there was less and less trash ... and hardly anything to pick up this year, so the neighbors mostly had fun at a cookout. When public spaces are cleaned up regularly, people actually mess up those places less. So I expect in a few years, Riverside Park will take less and less work to maintain. Then EVERYBODY can go to parks mostly to have fun and enjoy the outdoors!
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