Local residents in the Norwood section of the Bronx got down to business last Monday, Aug. 10, showing up to help clean up Williamsbridge Oval Park in response to a call from elected officials, including Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz Jr., City Council Member Andrew Cohen, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and State Sen. Jamaal Bailey.

As reported by Norwood News, a trail of devastation, including fallen trees and branches strewn across pathways and sports courts, was left in the park after Storm Isaias struck New York City on Tuesday, Aug 4, leaving 300,000 New Yorkers without electricity, some for more than a week.

But long before then, local Norwood residents like José Diaz were already concerned about the state of the park, and other parts of the neighborhood in the context of COVID-19. For months, Diaz repelled at the sight of used and discarded masks and gloves, carelessly thrown on sidewalks, outside nursing homes and in the park, while inside nearby hospitals, front line workers battled over several months to save people’s lives in the midst of a global pandemic.

The depressing sight of overflowing trash cans, combined with the storm’s damage eventually led to an early evening collective clean-up by Friends of Mosholu Parkland, Friends of Williamsbridge Oval Park and Bronx Buccaneers, with support from the NYC Parks Department and local elected officials. Lorita Watson is education director at Friends of Mosholu Parkland (FOMP) and spoke to Norwood News about the clean-up efforts.

“We do clean-ups in different areas, but this particular one was since it’s on a Monday, and following the Bronx Borough President’s initiative #meaningfulmondays, I was like, ‘Oh, the Oval needs it,'” she said. “And it’s geared towards parks, but it [the Oval] hasn’t seen a cleaning in a few months since the COVID, and you walk in the park and you’re seeing all this trash, so it needed to be done. Without the alternate side of the street parking, it just got behind. It’s just bags of trash.”

Asked what the turn-out was like, Watson said to walk all the way around the circumference of the park is about a half-mile, and so she knew collective help was definitely needed. “It would take a lot of people, and it’s been an awesome showing,” she said. “I mean we’ve gotten half of the park done in an hour.”

Asked if the intention was for the volunteers to clean-up the entire park that same evening, Watson said it was not so much about cleaning up inside the park, as outside on the perimeter, explaining that when cars park and leave trash on Reservoir Oval, and when there’s no alternate side street parking, the Sanitation department can’t clean up.

“So, it’s been like three or four months, actually four months since we’ve had regular parking and regular clean up, and I’m sure if Sanitation had to do it, they would’ve had to do it in a few rounds,” she said. “So, [this] community [is] coming together. We’ll make it happen fast.”

Norwood News asked Watson if the group was working together with the Parks’ department on the effort, since Parks’ trucks and employees were also seen in the park on the same evening. She said the plan was to allow Parks to concentrate on what they do best, and her group would then help out with the remaining work.

She said because of the storm, most of the fallen trees were inside the park and the Parks’ department folks had been doing a really good job tackling that aspect of the clean-up both in the Oval, and along Mosholu Parkway.

“They’re probably more important on concentrating on cleaning up the trees than cleaning up the trash,” she said. “So, we’re doing our piece with the trash but yes, there’s a lot of clean up to be done. I mean on the tennis courts, I know two trees were taken away so we can play tennis. That was like, ‘Oh good, the trees [are] gone now,’ the next day or so, so it’s been good,” she said.

Ron Bucalo works locally for the Parks’ department and regularly tends to Oval’s gardens. When Norwood News spoke to Bucalo on July 31, we asked him about the overflowing trash cans, and he explained that the maintenance and operations team within the Parks’ department was responsible for the removal of trash.

Local resident, José Diaz, had previously provided photo evidence of used and discarded masks and other PPE items seen around nursing homes earlier in the pandemic, but was also concerned about seeing them in the parks. “Yes, it still happens,” he said in a second phone interview with Norwood News on July 28. “I did do a sign. I did a sign, and I printed it out, and posted it on Perry Avenue and I said, ‘Listen, you know, keep your garbage at home. Do not drop masks and gloves and PPE on the ground.’ I guess some people – they don’t do that anymore, but there’s still a few that do it and that’s the bad thing.”

Diaz said he remembered reading in an article somewhere a few months ago that the coronavirus stays on gloves and PPE for a couple of days, depending on the material, and this greatly concerned him. “Wow! You know what’s sad?” he asked. “There’s some people that don’t believe in this. They don’t think it’s as serious as what the media is saying. They don’t realize that people are dying, and I don’t think that’s a lie.”

“That’s so sad,” Diaz continued. “How could people be so – what is the word? Be so insensitive, maybe? That’s a good word to describe them, but I think there’s another word stronger than that. It makes me feel so uneasy, that there’s so many people, so many people [who don’t take the virus seriously], and I know a few.”

Meanwhile, regarding his gardening work, Bucalo said every day people thank him for the work he and his colleagues do to keep the park looking clean and trim.

“Oh, just a little simple thing is, during the height of the pandemic, you know, when we were well into it, after two or three months, and everything was closed, this park was about the only place people could come to,” he said. “And we had, at that specific time, the tulips and daffodils come up with all this color, so people were just so happy about being able to come here. That was like a biggie.”

Bucalo continued, “You know, they [the flowers] came out at kind of the right time, to whatever mood they [the residents] were in, which probably wasn’t very good. When they came here, and saw that, it kind of picked them up a bit.”

He added, “The people come up to you, and they say it’s been wonderful what they’ve seen with the color and everything, and the gardens, and what we’ve been doing. I think they were just acknowledging our presence here.”

As reported by Norwood News, a similar clean-up effort took place on July 20 along Mosholu Parkway, which was also organized by volunteers and local elected officials in conjunction with Friends of Mosholu Parkway.

Asked what Watson would like the Norwood community to know about the clean-up efforts, she said, “Yeah, you don’t have to do a big planned clean up.” She added, “You can do [it] any day, make it your little compulsion to clean up something, to help out where you can. You don’t have to wait for some initiative or anything, so just join your whatever, or do it by yourself – a grabber and a trash bag, that’s it!”

*Síle Moloney contributed additional reporting to this story.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.