Neighbors fed up with Bambrey Street trash dumping

PHILADELPHIA (WTXF) - A tiny street in Grays Ferry is covered in trash and neighbors are fed up.

It just might be the trashiest block in all of Filth-Adelphia.

The 1600 block of South Bambrey Street, a one hundred yard-long, two-lane wide stretch between Tasker and Morris that is little more than a landfill on asphalt.

Linda Peterson-Barnes pushed her 8-month old grandson past the mess, and shook her head in amazement.

"Wow," said Peterson-Barnes.

Then, with a shrug, she added, (but) what are you gonna do? What can they do about it?"

The debris includes discarded television sets, old mattresses, construction debris of all kinds, even a broken kitchen garbage disposal "disposed of" here.

The trash has been illegally dumped right next-door to a school district of Philadelphia vehicle facility. Signs warning against dumping are posted all along the building, right beneath cameras that are clearly no deterrent.

The school district isn't exactly doing its part to beautify the neighborhood. Fronting Bambrey is a graveyard of beat up and vandalized school district vans.

Stacks of undelivered newspapers dating to late August suggest this mess has been here for a while. And the amount and nature of the material suggests at least some of it is "imported" from remodeling crews from elsewhere.

"It shouldn't be like that in our community," says Hakeem Gilbert, who lived one block away. "I just don't see this in other neighborhoods. Why do it here and be like that in our neighborhood?"

Photos were snapped and sent to the Streets Department and to the school district and within the hour, district heavy equipment was out on Bambrey pushing the small piles of junk into one massive and messy mountain, making the street impossible to navigate.

The clean-up is not the district's responsibility; it is the city's.

And, late in the afternoon of October 4, a Streets spokeswoman reached out to Fox 29 to verify that fact.

She says the city will be out on Bambrey first thing in the morning of October 5 to remove the mountain of trash and clean the street, once again making it passable.