Vigilante Street Cleaning

By Matt Wood in Miscellaneous on Feb 1, 2006 6:32PM

Chicagoist usually isn't in the business of dispensing personal anecdotes, but today is a slow local news day so we thought we'd regale you with our solution to a neighborhood dilemma.

Back in December, ComEd did some work in our neighborhood. For two or three nights, they parked a truck in the middle of the street and set up a dozen construction signs so they could hop down a manhole and do their thing. After they were finished, they kind of haphazardly stacked the signs on the curb, blocking two parking spots and partially obstructing the sidewalk with a large "Workers Ahead" sign. This annoyed Chicagoist because parking is increasingly scarce on our block, and because we have to use that sidewalk every day. But we assumed that they were coming back to do more work, or that someone from ComEd or Streets & Sanitation would eventually come by to collect the signs.

Weeks passed, no more workers, signs still in the way. We were finally fed up enough that we stacked the smaller flashing sawhorses neatly on the edge of the sidewalk to clear the parking spots. The big sign was still in the way, but we held out hope that someone would come by and get it. More time passed, still nothing. Meanwhile someone knocked over the large sign so that it was straddling a fire hydrant and completely blocking the sidewalk. We finally had enough, so last night we carried all the signs across the street to an empty lot. Problem solved.

As proud as we are of our vigilante street cleaning, we're troubled by a few things:

• Did we do something illegal? (we can show you exactly where the signs are if we did)


• Should we have called someone first in hopes that they would remove the signs, or were we right in our instinct that if we didn't do it ourselves, no one would?


• Why hadn't anyone come to pick up the signs in the first place?


• And why were so many people out on the street at 11:30 on a Tuesday night to gawk at us while we did this?

Feeling guilty in hindsight, we called around this morning to solve this problem through official channels. A city 311 operator told us it was definitely ComEd's problem, so we called them next. The ComEd operator pressed us for our name, account number, etc, which we denied (hah, they'll never find us, especially not on the internet!), but we were able to give them an approximate address of the leftover signs. She "put in an order" to have somebody "come get them when they have time." Not exactly confidence inspiring, so we're happy that we tidied up the neighborhood ourselves. And at least now we can say we tried to do it the right way.

UPDATE - We saw a fleet of ComEd trucks doing work about five blocks east of our signs last night at 10:30, but alas, this morning they were still there. Guess they didn't have time to get them.