From mean to green.
That was the Park Slope Civic Council’s idea for busy Fourth Avenue on Saturday when about a dozen members tackled street litter and planted flowers to spruce up their neighborhood’s busiest thoroughfare.
The volunteers from the council’s Fourth on Fourth Avenue committee brightened the boulevard as part of the group’s annual Fall Civic Sweep, bagging stray garbage, planting about 300 daffodil bulbs in tree beds along eight blocks of the roadway between Degraw and Pacific streets, and installing two planters on a traffic median near the Butler Street intersection. The busy stretch of road may look better now, but it will be twice as nice next year when the daffodils bloom, and it will only get greener as the calendar pages turn and the trees grow in improved beds, organizers said.
The Department of Transportation provided the committee with the planters as part of the city’s traffic-calming plan for the speeding-prone strip.
The transportation agency did not have the funds to add flora to the planters, committee co-chair SJ Avery said, so the committee secured the funding for the soil and the plants through a donation from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
The Fourth on Fourth Avenue committee has also been pushing the city to add more trees and tree guards to the largely barren boulevard, Avery said.
And Fourth Avenue wasn’t the only place in the area to get the green treatment on Saturday.
Advocacy group Friends of Douglass-Greene Park also planted 300 daffodils and ripped out weeds in Gowanus’s beloved Thomas Greene Playground during the annual, citywide It’s My Park Day volunteer event.
“This will be great for our ongoing weeding efforts in the park,” said Sue Wolfe, president of the group.
It’s My Park Day, an initiative of the Parks Department and the City Parks Foundation, draws thousands of New Yorkers to help clean up neighborhood parks across the five boroughs.
