White plastic bags of household garbage filling a trashbasket meant for casual litter. Paper and trash strewn about the ground. A Styrofoam container and a discarded newspaper pressed by the wind against a playground fence.

It would have been hard to guess that just six days before - on March 15 - this patch of open space in South Philadelphia had been scoured spotless by volunteers inspired by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

With spring cleanups sprouting across the city as part of pre-primary politics and Mayor Nutter planning a citywide effort on April 5, the sprucing-up of Chew Playground offers an object lesson: cleaning up the city might be relatively easy compared with keeping it that way.

Fortunately, at Chew someone was watching.

In a second mini-cleanup, on Monday, city workers returned to the playground at 19th Street and Washington Avenue, and pulled together a dozen bags of trash and garbage.

The original cleanup had been festive, more like a early Easter egg hunt than a group trash collection. About 75 adults, teens and children wielding trash bags had shown up to tidy up at the playground, which had become a bit of a neighborhood eyesore. The volunteers were members of a grass-roots group dubbed Obama Works. Its goal was to clean the playground as well as register new voters for the candidate.

Word of the impending efforts to tidy up Chew Playground had been well received.

"It's good if they clean it up," 14-year-old Ashanier "Ash" White said a week before the cleanup as she watched two friends playing one-on-one on the court in frigid early March weather. "It will make more people come here to the neighborhood. Nobody likes a dirty neighborhood. It gets dirty because people don't care."

Marvin Cooper, 35, standing across the street from Chew, waiting for a bus, on the day of the cleanup was impressed: "It's always a good thing. It keeps kids off the corners. It's a beautiful sight. ... One thing Obama is pushing is that if we stick together, we can accomplish anything."

Volunteers said Obama Works came together via the Internet after several of the would-be volunteers read an article by two Yale University students that called for a new Obama campaign strategy that would go beyond tedious phone-banking and door-to-door canvassing to galvanize public attention.

Architect Adam LeGrand, 25, of Delaware County, said the group formed with little help from the campaign.

"We got tired of waiting for the campaign to get started," LeGrand said.

"We're trying to create a template for change - a way to change words into the action Obama is inspiring in everyone," said Madeleine Campbell, 32, of Logan Square.

A week after the original cleanup, Derrick Jenkins, 48, owner of the Pier 22 restaurant across the street, thought the playground still looked good despite some deterioration.

Viewing the playground from a window of a Laundromat in which he stood washing clothes, he said: "My personal opinion? It looks clean."

"You've got to start somewhere."