Note: Next Woodhaven Town Hall meeting - Thursday, September 18, 7 PM at the American Legion Hall (89-02 91st Street). Guest speaker will be Deputy Inspector Hank Sautner from the 102 Precinct and representatives from HeartShare Human Services of New York, who will be opening up a new facility on 89th Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard.
For the past few years, the Woodhaven Residents' Block Association has been fighting against graffiti on several fronts: by calling in reports of graffiti on houses, by photographing and compiling tags and handing over to the NYPD, and by going out and doing the hard, dirty work of painting over it where we can. Armed with a variety of paints (Green, Blue, Red), brushes, rags, gloves, silver spray paint -- the resident quietly go about cleaning up graffiti vandalism.
Over the summer, the WRBA visited each and every mailbox several times - and painted them whenever they were tagged by vandals. Below is a map of Woodhaven along with the location of every Blue and Green mailbox in town. As of 9/7/2014, every mailbox has been visited and verified clean.
The great thing about cleaning up after vandals is that you can see the difference right away. An ugly tag gives way to a clean mailbox.
This summer the WRBA expanded their cleanup efforts to include traffic control boxes, many of them sitting tagged and peeling (and unappealing) for years.
The blue mailboxes are the ones that get used by the general public so we take extra care to make them look nice.
It's amazing what a clean mailbox does to the surrounding area. Look at the two pictures below - it's the same exact surroundings, but the picture on the right looks like it was taken in a nicer, cleaner neighborhood.
Painting over vandalism is something we can do proudly, in daylight - not scurry around at night doing it under the cover of darkness.
One by one the WRBA cleaned up Woodhaven. Interested in joining us on a future cleanup? Email us at info@woodhaven-nyc.org or call 718-296-3735 and leave a message.
Some of the mailboxes were hit on all 4 sides - but it only takes a few moments to paint the box.
There are some people out there who say "Why bother?" Generally, those are people who don't bother - so they wouldn't understand. The WRBA has residents who care about their community - not just their own property or their own block - but your part of town, your block.
These are all pictures of 1 mailbox - all 4 sides.
The WRBA has also added Fire Boxes to it's list of cleanup activities.
This Fire Box isn't even in use any more - we cleaned it, inside and out!
A few more - in all we cleaned almost 2 dozen mailboxes on Sunday - we will be keeping an eye on them and ask that you consider helping in 2 way - (1) If you see a mailbox tagged, let us know. Email us at info@woodhaven-nyc.org or call 718-296-3735 and leave a message. And (2) Join us for a future cleanup - they're fun!
If you have any comments, or would like to suggest other projects, drop us a line at info@projectwoodhaven.com or projectwoodhaven@aol.com.
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Photos by Joey Wendell