EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio — The grounds around Mayfair Elementary on Mayfair Avenue in East Cleveland are well kept. An inviting place for young students as it should be.
But at the end of the block here sits Manhattan Avenue which has been anything but.
"This is a pathway for the kids to get to school," said David Webb of East Cleveland about the stretch of road along a set of railroad tracks that has become a prime spot for illegal dumping.
Something Webb knew needed to change.
"We just wanted to make sure that the kids were safe, they had a good clean environment to get to," he said.
It's an undertaking Webb is not unfamiliar with. News 5 first introduced you to him last September when he stepped in to clean up after Labor Day festivities left a mess and a bad taste with him.
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"I said, 'Man I've got to get down there,'" Webb said last September. "Just felt compelled to come down here and help any way that I could."
He got that mess cleaned up, and he set out with his son Monday to begin the daunting task of cleaning several blocks of Manhattan Avenue.
"You know it's going to take a couple of days, but we want to get it to where it's at least, uh, livable," he said.
Two days later, he was proud to show off the progress. "We cleaned all that back here. I mean, we're coming up here, this is the part we're going to dig out and throw all of this out. I mean we did clean up everything down here."
Only this time, he's getting a huge assist from the city, helping him to speed up a project that would have taken him the rest of the week, if not longer.
"I think it's like our fifth or sixth load today," he said as a front end loader full of debris filled a waiting truck. "Yeah, they've been out here all morning... we've been out here all morning trying to get this together."
Together being the operative word said City of East Cleveland employee Jason Wallace.
"We need more people out here like that to come help," Wallace said of Webb. "We try to do as much as we can but obviously we have a dumping problem in East Cleveland."
Webb said he's tired of people not only dumping in East Cleveland, but dumping on East Cleveland and he hopes his actions, in some small way, address both.
"I came up here, I love East Cleveland," he said. "East Cleveland was one of the richest neighborhoods and now it has a bad rep and I want the reputation to get back to where it was. I want people to want to come out here and live and want to come out here and stay."
