Special Activities
Besides the general cleaning work for the removal of rubbish and waste many cities add special activities to their programs. These are found to be helpful in improving both sanitary and esthetic conditions. In a few cities drastic measures are resorted to in special cases. In Philadelphia, for example, the names of 600 owners of unimproved property which required cleaning were obtained and to each was sent a written request to improve conditions. The results were gratifying. In other places photographs of unsanitary conditions have been taken and the pictures either published or sent to the owners or occupants of the premises.
In Chicago an agitation was started to clean the roofs in the downtown district, as it was claimed that most of the dirt filling the air and streets was blown from the roofs, which had not been cleaned since they were built.
School gardens and tree planting are popular in many cities and are made a part of the Clean-Up Campaign program.
Through tireless energy the Director of Social Centers of the public schools in Cincinnati succeeded in having hundreds of school gardens planted. Many of these were planted in vacant lots which had formerly been the abiding place of heaps of rubbish. One was upon what had been for years an objectionable public dump adjacent to a school. Several loads of dirt were applied in the fall and the cost defrayed from the campaign fund. In September an exhibit of school garden products was held and prizes offered.
Intensive vacant lot and back yard gardening campaigns were conducted in most American cities during the spring and summer of 1917. Although these campaigns resulted from the need to increase production, they assisted materially in eliminating many unsanitary spots in every city.
A Cincinnati firm in former years distributed trees in great numbers among the school children of the city and adjacent communities. Upon the suggestion of the Clean-Up Committee it decided again to make such distribution as a part of the Clean-Up Campaign, this time peach trees. Cards were given to all the school children who would agree to plant and care for the trees. Eighty-four thousand of these trees were distributed. The trees planted will bear fruit worth many thousands of dollars. The distribution of them formed a distinctive and unique feature of the Cincinnati campaign.