[Slideshow by Adi Talwar]

Tristan Walker, a 7-year-old Norwood resident, doesn’t know what he would do if Williamsbridge Oval Park didn’t exist.

“It’s like the only park I go to,” he said.

Tristan, along with more than a dozen other kids and several parents and aunts, were in Oval Park Saturday, April 28, doing their best to keep their park clean and beautiful by painting garbage cans with colorful designs and constructing holders for dog waste bags.

Friends of Williamsbridge Oval Park, with support from a Citizens Committee of New York grant, organized the event in hopes of getting people to clean up after themselves and“engendering a sense of pride in the park and the garbage cans,” said Eileen Markey, who was there with her two sons, Hugh and Owen. “This isn’t some faceless park, it’s the park that people use and love.”

The Friends solicited around 20 designs from kids for garbage can decorations. The winning submissions — 9-year-old Jimmy Heald’s person throwing away trash and 11-year-old Alexis Davila’s butterfly — were replicated onto about a dozen large metal garbage bins. Jimmy and Alexis received art supplies and gift cards.

Markey said they hope to use the other submissions as part of a public art project at the Oval Rec Center, which is scheduled to open by June 21 after several delays.

Editor’s note: A version of this story appears in the May 3-16 print edition of the Norwood News as do two of the photographs taken by Adi Talwar.