After pleading in vain for City Hall to install a trash can near the corner of Olive and Chapel streets, Andy Ross decided to take matters into his own hands.
Ross bought two plastic garbage cans and chained them to a light pole on the south side of Chapel Street, just west of Olive Street. Every week for two months, he has been walking from his house a block away and emptying the cans into his own blue plastic Toter.
Ross said he tried repeatedly to get the city to install trash cans there, and was denied again and again.
Asked about this last week, New Haven public works chief Doug Arndt said the city will install a garbage can there, possibly by the end of the week.
That may mean one less duty for Ross. The longtime Wooster Square activist still has many more plans to improve the block, and to create a connection between Wooster Square and downtown. He’s already begun on some of these, installing murals on the side of the Firestone tire store and putting up photos of dogs in the blacked out windows of the Comcast building.
Ross, a Republican who’s running for alderman in Wooster Square’s Ward 8, has for two years been picking up trash along the block at least once a week. Last Monday, he appeared wearing linen pants and wingtips and toting his blue Toter, a broom and dustpan, garbage bags, and an unsettling surprise discovered just two days earlier.
He held up a sandwich bag containing a used syringe that he’d found while cleaning up on Saturday.
“Some litter can be very dangerous,” Ross said. “God knows what’s on it.” Imagine if a child or a dog had found it before he did, Ross said.
Ross found the syringe in one of the alcoves that line the Comcast building on the side that faces Chapel Street. Not only does the bleak brick building create a sense of isolation for pedestrians; the nooks make it unsettling to walk there, Ross said. “You don’t have a sense of security. You can’t see who’s in there.”
Ross said he hopes eventually to turn those alcoves into flower boxes. That would require some cooperation from Comcast. Ross has already had some success there.
“This all began with these [blacked-out] windows,” he said, pointing to the Comcast building. “It took me over a year to get to the right people to do something with the windows.” (Comcast did not return requests for comment for this story.)
Eventually, he got Comcast to consent to him covering the windows with photos of dogs, advertising the dog park around the corner on Union Street.
“Then URI [Urban Resources Initiative] gave me three trees,” Ross said, pointing to three saplings growing nearby. He said he gives them 25 gallons of water each, per week.
Even with those improvements — and the paintings he commissioned for the side of the Firestone store — the block was still overrun with litter. “Sometimes the trash is so bad I get a big leaf-blower and blow it into Comcast’s yard,” he said. “They should be contributing in some way.”
Ross said part of the problem is that Chapel Street has no sidewalk garbage cans between State Street and Wooster Square Park.
“So you can’t really blame people,” Ross said. “How long are they going to hold their garbage without littering?”
Conditions have improved by about 70 percent since he installed his cans, Ross said. He glanced in the barrels at an accumulation of fast-food wrappers, beer cans, and old newspapers. “That trash would be here” on the sidewalk, were it not for the cans, he said.
The first two cans Ross put out got stolen. He got replacements and chained them up. He also learned the hard way about the need to drill holes in the bottoms to let rainwater out, after a violent rainstorm turned the garbage into a foul concoction and Ross ended up having to hose down the street.
The “big plan,” Ross said, is to make the block a real connector, a gateway. “I’d like to find a way aesthetically to tie Wooster Square to downtown.” He said he’d like to see an arch over the street, saying “Entering Wooster Square” on one side, and “Entering Downtown” on the other. He said he’d also like to see more lighting for the block.
Ross stepped into the Firestone to talk to manager T.J. Towers, who has become a collaborator in his quest. They discussed plans to erect a map on the street corner outside the store, showing downtown attractions on one side and Wooster Square attractions on the other.
Towers offered to lend Ross his weed-whacker to trim around the young trees.
“This stretch here was terrible,” Towers said. “It looks better.”
Although Ross has put up a campaign sign on the block, he said his litter-patrol duties are not related to his quest to become the neighborhood’s alderman.
“I’m not trying to make this a campaign issue,” he said. “I just hope to inspire others to do the same thing.”
