Rittenhouse Square is usually the go-to place for many different activities. Visitors can walk their dogs, play a friendly game of baseball or just take a stroll around the area.
However, on this year’s Earth Day, the Friends of Rittenhouse Square and volunteers around from the community decided to continue the quarterly tradition of beautifying the park in the rain.
“So much trash blows in from places where people litter,” said event coordinator John Armstrong. “People throw things out, it just collects in these random places. especially in neighborhood parks [which] really seem to be a big sponge for it.”
Neighbors of the Rittenhouse community used garbage bags to clean up the trash on the lawn. They were on the hunt to pick up litter, and anything else that doesn’t improve the park’s atmosphere.
Even in the rain, you could find volunteers passionately paying their dues to the Earth.
“The rain wasn’t too bad,” said volunteer and Temple Alum, Sarah Demers. “It wasn’t a major deterrent. I just sprinkled a little on our walk in and a little while we were here, but it was really important for us to make an effort to come out because earth day is really important as climate change keeps worsening, we have to do the best with what we’ve got.”
Demers and her colleagues planned to help clean up Rittenhouse Square a month in advance of the date.
The organizers and the volunteers urge others to do so as well and hope that this cleanup and others like it will inspire visitors of Rittenhouse Square to help keep the park clean not just on earth day but all day long.
“One of my personal mottos is leave it better than you found it.” said Armstrong. “I think that’s true for a place like Rittenhouse Square, you know where a lot of the maintenance, and a lot of the care is kind of invisible to people.”
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