Sweep Finds Dark Streets, Cracked Walks

“Look at that!” Delphine Clyburn called out at Thompson Street and Shelton Avenue, pointing to one of Newhallville’s many overgrown trees. ​“Where’s parks?”

Clyburn, a Newhallville alder, has been trying for years to call the city’s attention to overgrown trees blocking streetlights and other neglected quality-of-life hazards that make her neighborhood more dangerous.

This time, practically the whole city government’s representatives were right there with her, and taking notes.

It was Day Two of ​“Operation Clean Sweep.” Dozens of city inspectors and officials — representing the building, fire marshal, Livable City Initiative (LCI), parks, health departments — made a blitz of Newhallville this past Thursday and Friday to locate quality-of-life problems, plan how to fix them, then figure out a long-term strategy for turning such blitzes into permanent anti-blight efforts citywide. (Click here for a previous story about Day One’s focus on housing code violations.)

Now this week officials are following up on results and analyzing the results, refining the idea so they can roll it out to other neighborhoods.

On Friday’s blitz, officials found a single block of Thompson Street Newhallville’s beautiful trees strangling some neighbors’ pipes, wreaking havoc with their roofs and obscuring safety lights. They found trip hazards for elderly walkers where venerable roots push up into already broken sidewalks.

Some houses had abandoned mattresses, a nearby catch basin was clogged, and a fire hydrant needed repair, as did some falling porches and gutters of elderly residents who may be eligibile for help fixing up their houses but didn’t know it yet.

And Danielle Goodson’s landlord needed to put up a door between the furnace room and her basement living space.

For years neighbors and alders have been complaining and fixing separate problems by appealing to separate city departments.

Stumbling On The Sidewalk

During the two-and-half hour circumambulation from Winchester to Shelton and Thompson and Bassett streets, city Building Official Jim Turcio noted 20 code violations. Linda Davis from the anti-blight LCI agency noted 17.

Everywhere she led inspectors on Winchester, Thompson, Ivy, or Lilac streets, Ward 20 Alder Clyburn emphasized that the venerable trees of Newhallville make the area distinctive and gracious. They can also create and expense for the neighborhood’s many elderly residents.

“We got a lot of sidewalk stuff,” Clyburn added. She pointed out a number of elderly residents who had come along for the tour, walking gingerly, to join the inspectors.

One of them, Mary Griffen, confirmed that uneven sidewalks have long been a hazard over the five decades she has been in the neighborhood.

“They call, I send emails, I visit the departments,” added Clyburn as she expressed gratitude that the officials were out in force finally to address comprehensively the tree issue, which is inextricably connected to the sidewalk issue.

Trees are the purview of parks and rec. Public works handles sidewalk repair. Catch basin repair is the purview of the city engineer. That underlined the need for Friday’s effort at coordination and integration.

As City Engineer Giovanni Zinn set out on the inspection, Eric Crenshaw, a 25-year-resident of Daisy Street, engaged him in a chat above the leaf-filled catch basin by the police substation on Winchester Avenue.

“Is it important for homeowners to rake?” Crenshaw asked.

“It isn’t a legal responsibility” like shoveling sidewalks, but it does augment the city’s regular cleaning, replied Zinn. If there’s clogging down below, in the sump pump of the basin, citizens should call the Engineering Department for help.

The city has about 9,000 catch basins, and ​“not all catch basins are created equal,” Zinn added.

Crenshaw said he found Zinn’s response reasonable. However, he continued to have a beef with public works officials, who were along with the inspectors, regarding snow removal. ​“It’s always been a concern. Eight or 10 hours after a storm,” the snow is still there, he said.

The owner of 179 Bassett St., James Scott, reported: ​“There are tree roots eating my sewer system. They did some work [sanding the concrete], but they laid more concrete. They should have taken the tree down.”

Clyburn made sure that LCI’s staffer for Newhallville, Linda Davis, made a note to pass along to Rebecca Bombero, the city parks and rec chief, who was traveling the neighborhood Friday with a separate second crew.

Turning onto Shelton with its tall stately trees running all the way up Lincoln Bassett School and beyond, Clyburn pointed out tree after tree impinging on nearby rooftops. ​“I called and told them to take all these trees down and replace them with the smaller ones,” she lamented.

Errol Ellis, an owner of two houses on Thompson Street, reported that an elderly neighbor at 99 Newhall St. is in a wheelchair. Unless something is done about the grossly protruding roots in front of his house, ​“he’s gonna flip over,” Ellis said.

“You Realize This Is Live?”

At Hazel and Shelton public works department Chief Financial Officer Mark DeCola caught up with Clyburn beside yet another instance where tree and sidewalk are going at it, to the hazard of passers-by. ​“I’m with you,” he said. ​“Trip and fall hazards and collapsing catch basins.”

As the team moved north on Shelton, LCI staffers went in back of 241 Shelton, where the agency is planning to sell some of the public land to new homeowners for parking space, since the cheek-by-jowl houses do not have driveways of their own.

As Clyburn waited for the LCI team to emerge, she pointed to some of those stately trees reaching across the sidewalk and roofs nearly into the windows of the facing houses.

“These trees strangle pipes,” she said, with attention to elderly residents who often don’t have the means to fix the resulting plumbing problems. ​“This ward is predominantly elderly. Take away [strangling trees] and put in new ones. I say cut the whole street!”

In front of the Cerda convenience store at the same corner, LCI’s Frank D’Amore noticed live wires sticking out from under a lighting fixture. The fixture was new, but the wires from the old were protruding and still hot.

“You realize this is live?” he said to the store owner Imran Khan.

“No.”

“We’ll tell the landlord and get a three-inch cover,” he said.

On the group moved to Ivy Street near Butler, behind the Lincoln Bassett School, not far from where 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes was killed in a still unsolved murder case.

Clyburn pointed to security cameras at the intersection and streetlights obscured by the beautiful fall foliage.

“If these trees would have been cut at Bassett and the lights and cameras working, then that would have been a help” in the Keyes case, she said.

On To ​“CitiStat”

As the two teams converged on Winchester for a debriefing, Clyburn thanked everyone for responding to ​“a cry from the people through me to you.”

All the data gathered over the two days will eventually find its way to a newly designed ​“CitiStat” portal where officials should be able to call up a building address or an intersection — and see on a map exactly what is going on there, or not, from catch basin and tree issues to building and smoke detector conditions. All different departments’ reports, from police incidents to LCI and health and fire marshal inspections, should for the first time be collected in a single electronic location.

Before that can happen, City Controller Daryl Jones, who accompanied Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter on the inspection, must take all the data from different departments and using an Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) application upload it on the city’s evolving Geographic Information System (GIS) maps.

“If there are multiple things happening at a house, we need to be able to have multiple things on the GIS,” Jones said. ​“We can pull in [information like] median income, crimes, where trees are being cut, where cameras are not working, so we can direct resources at problems.”

Jones described the ultimate product — GIS maps with all kinds of information and overlays at the fingertips of any authorized city staffer — as a SeeClickFix-style block-by-block information source to guide city neighborhood anti-blight efforts.

It was clear at the debriefing that the technological steps were still inchoate. Jim Turcio, the chief buildings inspector, suggested, for example, that all information be tagged to a street address.

Before all that, in the short term, city workers will address those 20 building violations.

Carter estimated that an internal debriefing about the response and the consolidating of the information will occur within a couple of weeks. Then, if successful, the same team sweep for ​“Clean City” will be rolled out to Fair Haven and other neighborhoods.