Green Streets

Greetings all! This past long weekend, I travelled to the big apple (New York City) to visit my uncles on Riverside drive. I wanted to take this opportunity to compare my suburban college intersection (the quad) to the numerous intersections in Manhattan. Normally when I travel to NYC I keep my eyes open for sales, this trip, however, my eyes were glued to the ground and my nearby surroundings. I observed that NYC actually has A LOT of city-wide programs involved in keeping certain areas clean and tidy. For instance- my uncle, who is a graphic designer, became involved in the Riverside Oval Association whose aim is to preserve and raise awareness for their residential area.

 

My uncle designed this logo- at first you think it is a leaf and maybe even a feather, but it also incorporates the street mapping of his residential area! Around where he lives, there are "Green Streets" or adopted areas of NYC where volunteers work around the clock to plant trees and keep up the maintenance of these gardens. The areas are represented by the following sign:

 

In addition to these programs, garbage bins in Brooklyn incorporate these messages around the rim:

 

 Other community initiatives exist to keep homes and streets clean as well.

However, as much as I feel there are some areas of NYC cleaner than our salt stained walkways and rain drains in the quad of Canisius College, other areas where no volunteer services resonate were found to be filthy and highly polluted.

On Sunday I attended a parade in Chinatown to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year; I was shocked by the amount of debris left on the ground from all the festivities

 

Look at all the piles of garbage just left on or near the streets

  

When you compare the two intersections- the one is looking at our small community intersection in the green area on campus and then look at all the traffic occuring in Colombus Circle, where the only yellow thing buzzing in the area are taxi cabs. The air is polluted by soot and dust, sidewalks are littered with discharged metro passes and gum wrappers, and people are dodging one another, barelling in every direction to get to where they need to go. Although I do enjoy vacationing in New York City from time to time, you learn quickly to appreciate the beauty of cleanliness and the sensible people of Buffalo, NY.