Schenectady eyes volunteer help for litter, graffiti cleanup

A swath of garbage, hundreds of feet wide, is gracing one of the entrances to Central Park.

That section of the city’s jewel has also been covered in graffiti in an attack that stretches from the city’s best baseball field to the bathrooms in the center of the park.

More than 60 graffiti tags cover every sign and building on the Fehr Avenue side of the park.

And the city doesn’t have the money to clean it up.

Luckily, volunteers and a few arrests are going to help.

Police caught several young teenagers who are accused of painting graffiti on the city’s equipment shed, one of several buildings hit recently. They will pay restitution, city Supervisor William Macejka said.

The county’s Center for Juvenile Justice called Macejka to ask if the children could clean up their work themselves. Macejka said no.

“We have unions and stuff. We can’t let them come in,” he said.

The children will pay $1,787 to cover the cost of city labor and materials instead.

Work will begin next week and should take about two days, Macejka said.

“But that’s just our building, that one building,” he said. “They got lots of other buildings.”

Police have not yet charged anyone in connection to the other graffiti tags.

While city officials have not yet figured out how to cover the cost of cleaning up those tags, Acting Mayor Gary McCarthy has worked out a way to get the litter cleaned up. He’s asking volunteers for the first of many “days of service” to the city. So far, youth groups and JROTC high school students have signed up, while Upper Union Street business owners have offered pizza, water and other essentials.

Litter was spread across the entrance when city workers filled the area with a mountain of snow. All that snow has finally melted away, leaving behind a visual recording of what the city’s streets look like before street sweepers go through.

There are flattened Stewart’s coffee cups, fragments of candy wrappers and dozens of crushed soda and beer cans. Plastic juice bottles abound. There’s even some cloth — a purple shirt, a blue blanket and a small white rug are scattered along the pavement.

Plastic Price Chopper grocery bags made it through the winter intact, as did one CSEA union beer cozy. A windshield wiper, perhaps testament to a mid-blizzard crisis for one driver, is laying alone in the middle of the park entrance. Empty coolant and oil bottles are also strewn about the lot.

There’s only a thin layer of trash on the ground, but it stretches through both parking lots and all the way back to the edge of the hill at the top of the park.

City workers will haul the trash away once it’s collected. The city will also provide some rakes and gloves.

The ground is too wet for city equipment to simply scrape up the trash, Deputy City Clerk Chuck Thorne said.

“Nobody could get in there with equipment without wrecking the lot,” he said. “I had cut through there a few times and it was like little lakes there.”

The ground has finally dried, and volunteers will gather on May 14. City officials set the date for late in the spring in hopes of letting the ground dry out first.

In the meantime, the city is hanging a sign at the site advertising the event.

“So many people are calling complaining about the condition of the lot,” Thorne said. “At least the sign will show we haven’t forgotten about the lot.”

McCarthy will turn to volunteers for other work, too, Thorne said.

“We’re calling it the first Day of Service,” he said. “This is serving as a kickoff to these days of service. We’re going to be identifying projects that make sense for volunteers.”

The projects won’t be items that the city had budgeted to complete in-house, he said.

“It can’t be something that falls under regular city maintenance,” Thorne said. “It has to be unusual circumstances. We have ideas of maybe sprucing up the business districts or parks.”

Removing graffiti could also be a possibility.

Taggers have written their names on buildings throughout the city in what Macejka called a sudden burst of crime. The Stockade has been badly hit, and the Bellevue neighborhood was hit last month. On Wednesday, taggers returned and spread more graffiti in Bellevue, as well as painting their names on many park buildings there.

Despite the reputation that graffiti is a street art form, these tags are uni-color and do not include any images. They appear to simply be names — usually nicknames or initials. One of the juveniles arrested for writing graffiti on the city’s equipment shed simply painted the same collection of letters five times in a row, covering an entire strip of wall.

Others progressed into the park, going as far as the bathrooms, where they painted on the bricks. It’s far more costly to remove spray paint from bricks.

The bathrooms are near the toddler playground, where parents are often present, but the graffiti was only painted out of sight, on the far side of the buildings.

Taggers also hit the dilapidated trailer that has been abandoned near the tennis complex. Most of the trailer windows and doors are boarded over, and the painted wooden steps to the entrance are badly peeling.

The trailer used to be in a little-used part of the park, but now disc golf players often walk past it. One of the disc baskets overlooks the trailer.

Despite the players’ regular presence, there are 20 graffiti tags on the far side of that building.