The first photo was taken today, but I have photographed and reported to 311 this same pile of trash, multiple times, since May 3, 2020. It was marked as “completed,” but when you note unique items in the trash, it’s obvious when it hasn’t moved. What are those unique items? Colors of lipstick. Piles of mail addressed to specific people.

The message sent by a city that leaves garbage wherever is that it’s okay to keep dumping. Sure enough, more trash has accumulated in this same area.

Here is a car, up on crates, in the process of being stripped for parts. This is on the same park road as the bulky waste pictured above. This road runs between Love Lane and Tower Avenue, and provides access to the parking lot for Keney Park (Waverly). One question is how the vehicle got there if the road was gated as it should have been. Did someone drive it through the Waverly fields and ditch it? Did they drive it in when the park road was open, and if so, why wasn’t the road checked by the keyholder before the gate was closed at end of day?

And why shouldn’t people think that our parks are landfills? The picture below shows trash by the park road gates on Love Lane. That’s broken furniture off in the distance, just a few feet away from Gully Brook.

Follow the park road to where it meets Tower Avenue and you’ll see another pile of trash at the barricaded carriage road into Keney Park.

All photos in this post were taken on July 4, 2020 and reported to 311.

It’s remarkable what conditions are allowed to fester in some parts of Hartford, while in others, if you report so much as an empty soda can on the sidewalk, it gets addressed the same day.

For those less familiar with this area, I’ve pinned the dump sites as close as possible to their actual locations.

Again, much of this comes down to what the City of Hartford leadership has determined to be a priority. If you don’t sufficiently fund the Department of Public Works, this is what our city becomes.