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Before and after:

At 10:00 am on Saturday, April 18, members of the East Lynn Community Project converged on Kiley Park to rid its  children's playground, baseball fields, tennis and basketball courts of winter debris and litter.  As the days get warmer and clean-up projects build momentum across the city of Lynn, the folks of ELCP come every first and third Wednesday of the month to clean up Kiley Park. Now, with the commencement of National Volunteer week (April 19-25), they are ramping up their efforts by holding weekend cleanups.

This past Saturday's cleanup consisted of about a dozen residents and members of the ELCP who want to make the city of Lynn and their neighborhoods a better place to live. A youth baseball team practicing on the field also pitched in.

Sue, one of the leaders of ELCP told me how she had picked up six pounds of broken glass mixed in with the mulch that covers the children's playground. Much work still needs to be done to make Kiley Park a safe and beautiful place in which to play, and the ELCP hopes to engage the city of Lynn and the Department of Parks and Recreation.

The next weekend clean-up is scheduled for Sunday morning, April 26, at 10:00 am. Take pride in Lynn and be there!

More before and after pictures.

Just prior the new year, I decided to see what Strawberry park looks like now, after the clean-up in August. As you can see, this picture was taken before the recent snowfalls. I was happy to see a boy and his mother playing on the newly painted basketball court. On the tennis courts, youths played a friendly game of soccer.

The overgrown weeds surrounding the perimeter of the park were gone.  Although the basketball nets were not hung, a colorful mural was painted on the court, a marked improvement from the various tags scribbled on it prior to the clean-up.  The boy's mother said that someone had been coming once a week or so to maintain the improvements to the park.

Part of the Solution youth council, Straight Ahead Ministries, the Lynn DPW and the Essex County Community Organization (ECCO) were among the groups who participated in this park restoration.

See what the electrical box below looked like before the cleanup.

How is it that the character of a neighborhood ebbs and flows, with new residents moving in and others leaving? 

Consider my neighborhood. This spring, two groups of people moved into the house across the street. On the first floor, a family moved in. The father, who I shall call Bill works at Union Hospital as a nurse practitioner and is a personal trainer. He is a proud lifelong Lynner, whose oldest son goes to college. Different members of the family will sit out on the front porch most every night and peacefully hang out.

The house across the street is owned by an absentee landlord. Unfortunately, the 2nd floor tenants make so much noise that Bill has decided to move out. I don't know the 2nd floor occupants and their noise hasn't bothered me, but it has caused some disruption among adjacent households with children who need to go to bed early and wake up for school the next morning. 

Bill has tried to negotiate with the landlord, even pointing out a clause in the lease which prohibits excessive noise, but the landlord would rather see him and his family leave than kick out the noisy ones. "You gotta do what you gotta do," says Bill, so he is moving. Who knows who will move in next? Hopefully not anyone engaged in criminal activity.

I hate to see him go. But that's life in the hood with absentee landlords who care less about who lives in their houses and more about whether the rent check comes regularly. I would think that a landlord would want more stable, respectful tenants in their property, so that other like-minded people would be encouraged to move into a peaceful abode. Then again I am not a business man with rental properties. However, I like to think that I would be more responsible.

This is how a neighborhood ebbs and flows, with new people moving in, others moving out, some foreclosing on their houses, others buying that property in pursuit of the great American dream. Businesses come and go and change ownership. How do we as a neighborhood encourage it to flow in a direction that sustains healthy development? 

When a radio talk show host called Lynn a dump, Councilor Ford took it personally. Why did he get so upset? Maybe because the truth hurts.

I ponder this as I stoop to pick up the empty Courvoisier bottle in the gutter in front of my house. Then I think of the people living behind me who've piled old computer monitors and other assorted junk in the 3 foot space between their house and my backyard fence. Out of sight, out of mind. Ultimately, It's the absentee landlord's responsibility to remove these items, so any ticket that inspectional services writes up is probably ignored. Then I see the sewer drains in my neighborhood clotted with debris. Used syringes in the dark alley by the foreclosed house with boarded up windows. That's my neighborhood. People seem to treat it like it's a dump. I just don't get it. 

We held a neighborhood cleanup in May. The DPW was there. The city of Lynn and SCI Lynn chipped in. Lynn Lumber provided discounted trash barrels for distribution to residents. We cleaned up a cul-de-sac with several foreclosed houses (where the syringes were found), a parking lot on Essex and Chestnut Streets and the area around the Ingalls school. I even decided that I would adopt the cul-de-sac with the foreclosed homes and clean it up every now and again. I actually followed through for a couple of weeks, but grew discouraged. It didn't take long before the places we had cleaned up were littered again.

You'd think we would treat our homes, our neighborhoods, our environment, with more respect. What's it going to take to transform this multicultural place we call Lynn, where we must live so closely with our neighbors, into the city it could be? One person alone can't do it. Many people acting independently of each haven't been able to do it. It doesn't even appear that the many civic, municipal and social service organizations working independently of each other have been able to do it. These are all good beginning attempts, but something more is needed. When one thing is fixed, another one breaks somewhere else.

So I put it out to all of you who want to see a Lynn transformed? What are your ideas? How can we put them into action? How do we hold our leaders accountable? How do we reach critical mass? What must we as a community do to get to the tipping point? Why do I bother writing to this blog? Does anyone care to comment?

The neighborhood cleanup is fast approaching. It is tentatively scheduled for the 2nd Saturday of May.  read more »

Social Capital Inc. (SCI), is offering a second round of Neighborhood Leadership Awards of $500.00 to demonstrate the potential of residents to work together and improve their neighborhoods. We are especially interested in projects that meet one or more of the priorities identified at Downtown Lynn Community meetings:

1) Public saftey

2) Neighborhoodhood beautification  read more »

 read more »

Neighborhood cleanup on Oct.  read more »

In Lynn’s downtown/central area, younger residents tend to be better educated than older residents.  read more »

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