What’s up with all these people not shoveling out their fire hydrants? Shoveling the closest fire hydrant to your house takes a couple minutes when the snow is soft.  If a house catches fire, and snow like this has frozen hard, and it costs the Fire Department even a minute […]

The neighborhood hoarder Part 1. Introduction: So, you’re living in the long shadow of a hoarder’s house with never a bit of maintenance on the outside in twenty years. No paint. Gutters fallen off. Yard full of dead cars, old tires, an unplugged freezer with God-knows-what in it. Moss, bushes […]

The neighborhood hoarder Part 2. The Players: Owner, Leader, Neighbors, The City, Saboteurs working against you The Owner: The first and most important thing in doing a clean-up is, you have to get the owner’s permission. And get it in writing. Without that, you’re nowhere. For good reasons, private property […]

Neighborhood hoarder Part 3. The Clean-up Organization: Once we got permission to clean up, we simply went over and dove in. No firm plan, no set schedule. We have about 18 hours of daylight in mid-June so helpers could carry on long before, or after, the regular work day as […]

The neighborhood hoarder Part 4. Junk Car round-up “We break in to cars when we gotta. With pickaxe and hammer and saw. They say this garage has no license, yet it’s little care I for the law. Ta me weigh hey tow it away, the Lincoln Park Pirates are we, […]

The neighborhood hoarder Part 5. Landscaping Satisfying as it was to clean up the junk and cars. A little bit of landscaping after was like one of those makeovers you see where they give a street person a shave and haircut and turns him into cover material for Gentleman’s Quarterly. […]

The neighborhood hoarder      Part 6. Maintaining the groove and breaking into cars During the clean-up someone raised the question, “What’s to stop it from going back to the way it was?” My thought was that it wouldn’t happen. Almost none of the stuff in the yard had been Dave’s. […]