The North Main Neighborhood hosted a clean~up for our "Urban Forest" at the corner of E. Steele Street and Railroad Street this morning. Historic Salisbury Foundation, who owns the large wooded lot, petitioned volunteers from all over the community to help us clear this neglected and overgrown lot. WOW! Take a drive by and you'll see the difference!!!
Our neighbors to the north and west may not have realized what a problem this area has been, but there have been homeless folks camping in there, and free enterprise has been thriving in this little hidden forest! With much of the underbrush removed (we still have a ways to go!), the hiding places are now being eliminated.
Folks gathered at 9am this morning
with chain saws, loppers, rakes, and other implements of destruction to take on
the brambles, brush, campsites, and garbage that have been accumulating here
for years. The woods is much larger than we originally thought ~ it's
about 45,000 square feet or just over an acre. The easiest way to visualize the size of this lot is to picture a standard American football field from sideline to sideline ~ an area of 90.75 yards. A typical residential lot might measure 0.15 - 0.50 acres. So you can imagine the breadth of this project!
More volunteers from the Historic Salisbury Foundation are scheduled to return to our 'Urban Forest' this week to do some weed control spraying (sorry purists, but the brambles were FIERCE and they'll be back all to soon without some control!), and to chop some more vines and dead trees. We will be gathering our own volunteers out there again very soon to try to complete more of the work and make this an attractive part of our neighborhood. We can't do it without your support!
Speaking of support....can each of you ask your neighbors if they are on this mailing list? It would be nice to be reaching as many people as we can in our 40 block neighborhood with its over 400 households. We know we are just reaching the tip of the iceberg and we're confident that many more would love to support this neighborhood if they were just in the communication loop! Can we get you to forward more neighborhood contacts to us? THANKS!!!
A proposed part of this project was to perhaps paint a house along the N. Main Street corridor. If there are owner-occupied properties on N. Main in need of repair/paint, where owner qualifies as low-moderate income and is willing to sign lien, the Community Development Corp (CDC) has funds to make the repairs. It’s a bid process, so volunteer labor would not be needed unless we just want to participate as community building event. Do you know any likely candidates? 2-3 of these could make a big difference to our Main Street corridor. We were originally looking at only 1-story houses, but we’re now told that a 2-story house is no problem. The CDC can bid out the work as specified, so if painting is to be done by volunteers, that would not be in the bid. 
