Trinity College students, faculty, and alumni volunteered at various sites throughout Hartford on Saturday as part of the 16th annual “Do It Day.”
Members of Trinity’s Chapel Council got an early start to the day by adding some fresh paint at the Ebony Horsewomen site on Vine Street, next to Keney Park. Two other groups from the college worked alongside the Blue Hills Civic Association and Friends of Keney Park to clean up areas of Keney Park.
Outside the Mary Hooker Environmental Sciences Magnet School members of the college’s women’s crew team worked to restore the nature trail near Cemetery Brook.
Mary Pelletier of Park Watershed said one goal for the day was to remove the plastic barrier that has begun to disintegrate. It had been put in place to keep weeds out of the path, but over time lost its effectiveness.
A teacher from the Mary Hooker Environmental Sciences Magnet School on Broadview Terrace said the children do
not get out on the trail often, partly because it is so overgrown with poison ivy and the invasive Multiflora rose.
Even with these routine types of clean-up activities, Pelletier said, it is hard to keep up with maintenance without more funding and more permanent solutions for having a clear pathway.
Among the upwards of fifty “Do It Day” sites that received attention from over 700 volunteers on Saturday: the Mark Twain House, Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Dart Gardens apartment complex, the traffic island at Flatbush and Brookfield, and the area under the highway overpass along Capitol Avenue that has been dubbed the “Corridor of Hope.”
