Hawthorne/Jordan "Clean Sweep" Was A Whole Lot Of Garbage! Situations We Discovered While Looking For Old Tires...

Photos By John Hoff 

Systematically going through alleys to find old tires, we found other situations...enough for 13 calls to the 311 system.

However, since that system isn't available on the weekends (too bad, if you ask me) I just sent the list in by email, receiving an acknowledgement on Monday along with all the reference numbers. In the top photo...

You see one of the problems of doing a "Clean Sweep." Often you have to ask yourself, "Did they put that out for garbage, or does it just happen to be sitting there, and we should leave it alone?"

Other situations are more clear. Here, a pile of filth is behind a fence, though right near a garbage collection point. We can't get behind the fence, so that's a 311 call.

Situations turn up in the yards of vacant houses. That pile of black garbage bags is yard waste, but it's in the yard of a vacant house and appears to have been there for a long time. So that's a 311 call to hurry things along. 

As for the last photo, I don't know whether to consider this progress or a setback. Somebody dropping off piles of unwanted phonebooks found the yard of a vacant home, and just dumped the whole pile in the backyard. Somehow, this strikes me as marginally BETTER than putting the phone books on the steps of vacant, boarded up houses, individually.

But it still merits a call to the 311 system. 

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Hawthorne Housing Director Injured In Phonebook Mishap

Unwanted phone book dumping--which up to now has been merely annoying and environmentally unsound--has finally caused a serious injury in the Hawthorne Neighborhood of North Minneapolis. A couple days ago Jeff Skrenes--Hawthorne's dedicated Housing Director--was hit by a flying mass of phone books one physics expert estimated to have the approximate force of a falling old growth tree 30 feet in diameter.

Skrenes was....

...reported to be in critical condition, but still conscious and lucid enough to vow vengeance on behalf of the neighborhood association against companies like Dex.

"Read...Ed...Kohler's...blog...The Deets," Jeff managed to whisper, through lips that were bloodied but still (according to one eyewitness) quite kissable. "Must...protest...must take...direct action."

In the wake of heated emotions in the neighborhood after the injury of Skrenes, there was loose talk of gathering up truckloads of phone books and taking them right back to where they came from, only in a much more rain-soaked condition than when they arrived, unwanted, on the steps of houses which have been vacant for as long as two years.

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