23rd Annual JP Spring Clean-Up a Success

By Beth Wolfson

JAMAICA PLAIN – As Marie Turley cleans out one of the gutters on Union Avenue during JP’s annual Spring Clean-Up on Saturday morning, she can’t stop thinking about her friend, David Laeier. Laeier, an active JP resident who always attended the event, died suddenly last week leaving his neighbors stunned.

The neighbors collected trash on Saturday morning in Laeier’s honor. It is something they say he was planning to do with them.

“He was the heart and soul of our neighborhood and did this clean-up every year,” said Marie Turley, a JP resident who lives on Union Avenue. “He was just that kind of guy who was always helping people shovel their driveways in the winter, clean-up in spring… Doing Spring Clean-up in his honor made it more meaningful.”

JP Spring Clean-Up has been going on every third Saturday of April for 23 years. The co-chairs, Michael Reiskand and Bob McDonnell, started the event and still run it. Each year, neighborhood groups, crime watches and other organizations in JP sign up to clean specific areas of town. On the morning of the event, each group sends a representative to pick up the tools and garbage bags provided by the city of Boston and in the afternoon, Public Works picks up the collected trash.

“This year was very successful in large part due to the nice weather,” Reiskand said. “We got a great turn-out; probably 100-150 people participated. Groups cleaned Centre and South Streets, Johnson, Jefferson and Oakview Terrace Parks, and many residential streets, so we’re very happy with the outcome.”

The Parks and Open Spaces Committee was one group that joined the Clean-Up this year.

“We’re trying to get all the parks and tot lots cleaned up,” said Andrea Howley, chairman of the Open Spaces Committee. “We’re hoping our group has 20 people.”

Other members of the committee seemed excited to be participating and hoped to maintain the work done throughout the day.

“We wanted to do something positive and we hope to clean up the parks a few more times throughout the semester,” said Sarah Freeman, a member of the committee who helped clean the parks.

Although JP was the birthplace of the Spring Clean-Up, Boston decided to implement a similar program called Boston Shines six years ago.

“Boston always helped us the last 23 years and then six years ago, they started Boston Shines and modeled it off of what we’ve been doing here,” McDonnell said. “They tried to get it out in the public and get more areas of Boston to participate in spring clean-up.”

Today, various areas of Boston participate in Boston Shines, although they all do it at different times as Public Works would be unable to keep up if all of the trash needed to be collected on one day.

On Saturday afternoon, Public Works picked up over 40 bags of garbage from the Union Avenue group alone.

“We ran out of the bags provided by the city and had to start using our own,” Turley said after the bags had been removed. “It looks really wonderful now. David would be really thrilled.”