Downtown Lynn street sweeping starts next Monday, April 5, according to the city website, and the cleanup couldn’t come soon enough. Trash lies piled in Munroe Street gutters and underneath the Washington Street commuter rail overpass, to name just a few downtown locations left unsightly by a winter’s-worth of neglect.
Sweeping will take place from 4-8 a.m., Monday-Friday, with sweeping on streets in other neighborhoods around the city ramping up this week. Residents and businesses can do their part by moving vehicles out of the sweepers’ paths and letting the city know if municipal trash barrels are overflowing.
COVID-19 forced everyone to endure a lot for more than a year and a relatively inexpensive way to provide people with relief from COVID-19 doom and gloom is to give them a cleaner city. A swept street and trash-free sidewalks send a message that the city is doing its job to keep public spaces clean.
This is a message, frankly, that should have been sent during the winter when city crews armed with brooms could have swept the most trash-clogged downtown gutters on snow-free days and picked up garbage collecting along fences and in building alcoves.
The “broken window” theory of police works and urban planning holds that a sign of blight as minor as a broken window can set the stage for a street or neighborhood to get pegged as rundown and crime plagued.
The same theory can be applied to street trash: Debris blowing along a gutter or down a sidewalk sends a message that the city doesn’t care about appearances, so why should residents or business owners?
Lynn is experiencing a development surge led by Caldwell, the residential high-rise developed by the Procopio Companies on Munroe and Oxford streets. Trash-clogged gutters stand in ugly contrast to this handsome addition to downtown.
This spring’s street sweeping effort coincides with a gradual emergence from the grip COVID-19 has held on the world. If vaccinations combined with continued precautions can give people more freedom to gather and eat out, then clean streets will provide a welcome backdrop to our release from the pandemic.
Lynn residents and visitors to the city deserve and need a clean city and the cleanup effort should extend to the city’s cemeteries and parks to ensure they are not filling up with wind-blown trash.
Spring street cleaning also coincides with what we hope will be a push, sooner than later, to get children back in school and taking advantage of warmer weather to walk to school.
