Saturday’s “Beautify the Block” event saw volunteers and City Heights community members paint storefronts, upgrade planters and trash cans along with removing litter.
The paintings also included culturally rooted art.
“Absolutely no easy task. This has been in the making for about three months, bringing volunteers in bringing our sponsors in and our partner and bringing 200 volunteers to clean up a block is a lot of work,” said Alexis Villanueva, who is the CEO of the City Heights Community Development Corporation.
The event will help businesses that are still recovering from construction delays and street closures on University Avenue that impacted revenue, according to Villanueva.
Villanueva and other people at Saturday’s event said that not only is the project upgrading the area’s beauty, but it is also bringing the community closer together.
“Look at the businesses that were chosen to be a part of this. We have Red Sea, which is Ethiopian cuisine, we have 777 noodle house which is Vietnamese cuisine. We have utility boxes on the east side which around there is Guatemalan food, Latin food a ray of food, and then we have our East African community that rally, and all part of our volunteers so it absolutely brings community together,” Villanueva said.
A clean up at this scale has not happened in several years, according to the City Heights Community Development Corporation.