Greening Up MorningSide

Volunteers celebrate a successful Motor City Makeover at the Motor City Grounds Crew campus. Image courtesy of Nicolas Hall

MorningSide has been blessed in recent weeks with several volunteer efforts to clean up and green up our community. For the annual Motor City Makeover, we chose to hold our major clean-up project on Saturday, May 20 at the Motor City Grounds Crew campus on Barham St. Nearly 20 residents joined staff from Featherstone Gardens to build up the planting beds with many wheelbarrows full of mulch and compost, along with some serious weed removal.

Volunteers lay fresh soil along the garden beds. Image courtesy of Eric Dueweke

Volunteers from the Well Initiative Women’s Association, MorningSide board members Twiana, Nic, Eric and Alex and neighbors Denise R. from Courville, Delores M. from Three Mile, John W. from Whittier, and Allyce H. (with son CJ) from Courville were among those who beautified the new vegetable gardens.

At the same time, a work brigade from the Motor City Grounds Crew under the direction of Aaron Smith did an amazing job of removing illegal dump sites in the western section of MorningSide. The MCGC crew tackled a total of 19 different dumping locations with their “grapple” truck, removing over 60 cubic yards of trash. That’s enough to fill two standard-sized dumpsters! Thank you Aaron!!

Two Saturdays earlier on May 6, an amazing crew of staff and volunteers from The Greening of Detroit hit the streets of MorningSide to plant 50+ new trees, mostly along Cornwall, Haverhill, Nottingham, and Buckingham streets. Board member Charon Nogues served as primary liaison to the Greening staff, led by Christina Ridella who grew up here in the neighborhood. Gary Gray and yours truly were among local residents assisting in the tree planting. This marks the second consecutive year that Greening has blessed our community with a large tree planting project.

Most recently, a contingent of ~50 volunteers from Rocket Community Fund, under the leadership of Habitat for Humanity Detroit, came out on June 6 to beautify the Emerald Gardens site on Haverhill. A new privacy fence, a water catchment system and three new benches are among the improvements built by these hard-working folks.

Large and highly visible projects such as these will hopefully inspire each of us to clean up and green up our own house and block. Beautification is the antidote to blight, and is equally if not more contagious. Let’s keep up the momentum by improving our public spaces while at the same time reporting negative activity like illegal dumpers.