Photo Courtesy of Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
“City Cleanup Corps members have been valuable partners in our shared mission of keeping our city clean and safe,” said City Sanitation Commissioner Grayson.
By Forum Staff
The City Cleanup Corps has removed more than one million bags of trash citywide since the program’s launch in April 2021, former Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced.
According to de Blasio, the New Deal-inspired economic recovery initiative supports communities, businesses, and tourism by refreshing and revitalizing public spaces. As of Dec. 20, CCC members had hand-swept nearly 70,000 block faces, maintained more than 40,000 rain gardens, planted over 10,000 plants across the five boroughs, and painted over 630 properties that had been defaced with graffiti.
“As New York City’s Strongest pick up 12,000 tons of trash and recycling every day, City Cleanup Corps members have been valuable partners in our shared mission of keeping our city clean and safe,” said Department of Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson. “We applaud the Corps on today’s milestone and their ongoing work in the revitalization of our city. With nearly 1,000 new Sanitation Workers joining our team this year, the Department of Sanitation looks forward to continued partnership with the Corps’ expanded programs in the months ahead.”
Through the collaboration of more than two dozen City agencies and community-based organizations, members of the CCC tend to the needs of neighborhoods by hand-sweeping public spaces, cleaning defaced properties, power-washing sidewalks, tending to green spaces, and creating community murals, among other efforts to help bolster New York City’s economy. Since its inception, the CCC has employed more than 10,000 New Yorkers, and after surpassing this hiring goal, the program is supporting the extension of existing CCC members’ tenures through the end of Fiscal Year 2021, alongside the latest program expansions.
In partnership with the City Artist Corps, NYC Department of Probation, and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, City Cleanup Corps supported Beautify NYC, a program through which local artists and young people collaborated on arts projects to revitalize community spaces. From July to November, local arts organizations ran weekly project-based workshops for youth ages 16 to 24 across a variety of artistic disciplines, with both artists and young people paid for their work. The 21 projects, which ranged from designing tree guards to painting colorful murals, took place in seven neighborhoods across the City with Neighborhood Opportunity Network (NeON) Centers: East New York, Jamaica, Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, and the South Bronx. Each project culminated in a final event that connected artists, young people, and organizations to the broader community. Beautify NYC leveraged the power of art and culture to advance recovery in some of the areas most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. An additional number of workshops will continue through June 2022.
“City Cleanup Corps is transforming parks and open spaces across Jamaica Bay and the Rockaway peninsula. Thanks to these efforts, parks and shorelines are cleaner, the blight of graffiti has been removed from public spaces and our recovery is moving in the right direction. Most importantly, as we navigate the pandemic together, the city has recognized that our parks play an essential role in our recovery and the Conservancy is grateful to support the Corps to help improve these spaces,” said Alex Zablocki, executive director, Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy.
