Phila. cleanup rakes in honors

Mayor Nutter talked trash yesterday - record-setting trash.

Saturday's citywide antilitter blitz was "an incredible success," he said, and now Philadelphia has a new distinction: home of "the largest, single-day, citywide cleanup on record in the United States," according to Keep America Beautiful, the national campaign formed in 1953.

Nutter drew a laugh with the comment that staffers used a weather-control machine to produce a sunny day from the predicted rain that had organizers terrified.

Then, in all seriousness, he rolled out the numbers.

Planners had wanted 10,000 volunteers to clean 50 commercial corridors, 10 neighborhood recreation centers, and 10 areas of Fairmount Park, and remove one million pounds of trash.

The actual event blew those targets away.

"We removed 2.56 million pounds of trash," he said. "We had an estimated 15,000 volunteers. . . . We wanted to do 50 commercial centers - we did 71. . . . Ten rec centers - we did 28. Ten areas of Fairmount Park - we did 27. And we removed 186 abandoned cars."

Keep America Beautiful spokesman Rob Wallace confirmed Philadelphia's record.

While there are bigger sponsored cleanups - the Texas Trash-Off this weekend is expected to draw 200,000 volunteers - Philadelphia is the Rocky-like reigning champ for "single-city, single-day events," he said.

What cynics might call a dubious honor - a city so dirty it sets a record when it takes a bath - Nutter embraced as "the latest example of the tremendous reservoir of community spirit" in Philadelphia.

"By pretty much any measurement, we knocked this one out of the park," he said.

He thanked staffers involved in the planning as well as the sponsors - local businesses, sports franchises and SEPTA - for providing more than $150,000 in brooms, dustpans, gloves, snacks, and in-kind services.

He repeated that keeping Philadelphia clean has to be more than a one-day-and-done effort.

"I want people to think of the city as they would their living room. No one would trash their own home," he said. "Don't trash the city."

A quick tour of some of the sites visited Saturday by The Inquirer found them still clean yesterday, with some trash encroaching.

At 13th Street and Ridge Avenue, near the base of the Divine Lorraine Hotel under renovation, volunteers from the nearby Ridge Center homeless shelter had raked up bags of urban crud, including some syringes.

Yesterday, 72 hours after the cleanup, that piece of ground showed signs of litterbugs returning: a fresh newspaper, a broken bottle tied inside a small black plastic bag, an Almond Joy wrapper, a mango juice box, a tiny green glassine envelope of the type used to package crack cocaine.

And a little farther down the block: a Newport cigarette box, and two work gloves used by workers during the cleanup.

"There could be a trash can right in front of them and some people still won't put it in the trash," lamented passerby Landis Jones, 55, an unemployed interior decorator.

"This is a windy city. Right through here [trash] is to be expected," said Mark McAden, a shelter resident who worked on the cleanup. "That's why we have to keep it up."

Laura Gladden, a retired nurse, waited nearby at her regular stop for the No. 61 bus to North Philadelphia. While the area looked "much cleaner," she said, the razor-wire-topped fence across the street was still strewn with shredded plastic bags, which she called "a disgrace."

In West Philadelphia, a lot cleaned in the 4200 block of Lancaster Avenue was still clean, although another lot two doors down, which had not been cleaned, was still a pigsty of beer bottles, soiled diapers, yellow caution tape, Snapple bottles, and plastic sheeting.

Across the street, Ricky Triest, 49, manager of Bill's Used Appliances, complained bitterly that the cleanup didn't go far enough to remove that particular eyesore.

Then, cooling down, he said, "OK, so Rome wasn't built in a day. You can only do so much at one time."

Montana Alexander, owner of Montana Hair Center, near 60th and Spruce Streets, works adjacent to a city-owned lot that volunteers cleared Saturday of empty liquor bottles. That area was still clean yesterday.

Alexander said he lived in Northeast Philadelphia, where "the atmosphere makes you not want to throw stuff on the ground." What West Philadelphia needs, he said, are small Dumpsters to handle the volume of trash, not just city trash cans.

"We're in the ghetto, in the hood. It's a lot of people," he said. "And people are only going to do what they see other people doing."

"If you saw how bad this [lot] was, you'd know what a good job they did," said passerby Tony Burdon, 49, who said he worked "for the government" but did not want to name the agency.

He applauded the cleanup but said the number of dilapidated buildings in the area hampered efforts to keep it clean.

One rowhouse near the corner of 60th and Chancellor Streets is open to the sky and seems on the verge of collapse.

"You can see heaven in this hell we've been living in," said Burdon, pointing to the opening.

"Why would you want to clean up when you got to look at that every day?" he said. "Let's keep it real."