High temperatures. Pending rain. Midsummer vacations. Concurrent contiguous beautification project. Opening of the Latino Hispanic American Community Center. Humane Society Christmas in Summer. Despite all these countervailing factors, twenty-four neighbors chose to volunteer in Friends of Midtown’s first summer beautification project on Saturday.
With so few volunteers, we still managed to remove 81 bags of trash and weeds from five miles of streets, alleys, and sidewalks. That is the same number of bags filled as the spring cleanup, which featured twice the volunteers. Much of this consisted of high weeds from outside the vacant building at Third and Muench streets. Unfortunately, that weeding work prevented us from covering all of Third Street from Maclay to Forster, as planned. However, since FOM has never done a summer event before, I view any work we completed as an improvement on past performance.
In addition to the litter cleanup, two volunteers placed seven new planted barrels outside Midtown businesses between Verbeke and Forster streets: Midtown Scholar, Broad Street Market, Historic Harrisburg Resource Center, the HodgePodgery, Gifted Hands, Urban World, and the Soup Spot. The barrels contained canna, variegated liriope, portulaca, and vinca. Thanks to all the businesses who agreed to water these plants. These barrels were paid for with a generous gift of $500 from the Auchincloss Family Fund of the Foundation for Enhancing Communities on behalf of Mr. & Mrs. S. Sloan Auchincloss.
Thanks also to the Neighborhood Center for allowing FOM to use its facility as a meeting place and to Mercado’s on Third Street for discounted pizzas for volunteers.
In the end, however, the event would not have been successful without those who helped. I thank all of you.
If anyone has any recommendations about how we could have improved on the event, please let me know. Were routes too short or too long? Were groups too small? Should we never hold an event in the summer again?
Separately, I would like to thank the Olde Uptown neighbors for organizing a beautification event on Saturday. I don’t have numbers, but I know I saw many volunteers picking up litter in some of Olde Uptown and planting at Second and Muench and Third and Peffer. I hope in the future we could better coordinate efforts and cooperate to efficiently maximize beautification throughout all of Midtown.
Finally, the Friends of Midtown Beautification Committee meets tonight at 5:30 p.m. at the Midtown Cinema. Attached is the agenda. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if not a current FOM member.
Thanks for your support.
Shawn Westhafer
Beautification Chair
Friends of Midtown
