Candus Carmon has lived on Otisco Street with her husband and three kids for four years. Several houses that line the street have multiple broken windows, unkempt lawns and faded or chipping paint. Some of the neighboring houses are abandoned and garbage litters the street.

‘No one wants to pick up their trash around here,’ Carmon said. ‘And when you try to bring it up, no one wants to talk about it.’

But after Home HeadQuarters’ Block Blitz, Carmon sees the neighborhood heading in a positive direction.

‘My house looked like an office building before, and now it looks like a home,’ Carmon said.

Home HeadQuarters is a nonprofit organization aimed at revitalizing and rebuilding homes in Central and Upstate New York. At its annual Block Blitz event, a fundraiser and neighborhood cleanup, volunteers flock to two streets in the downtown Syracuse area to do basic home repairs and beautify residents’ homes by painting, gardening and landscaping. They also board up abandoned homes.

This year’s event took place on the 700 block of Otisco Street of the Near Westside and the 100 block of Hoefler Street of Skunk City on Friday.

‘The goal of the day is really to get people into the neighborhoods that we’re working in and show that significant change can be done if we all really work together,’ said Ali Jackson Popp, Home HeadQuarters’ marketing coordinator.

The streets were lined with half a dozen pickup trucks, construction vans and paint cans marked with numbers according to which house they would be used to paint. A handwritten sign that read ‘WET PAINT’ was taped on a freshly painted porch. A group of volunteers plucked weeds by hand while others assembled a shed.

Volunteers included large corporations, like Bank of America, IBM and Sherwin- Williams; local businesses, like Murtaugh Restoration and Syracuse United Neighbors; and students from Syracuse University, Onondaga Community College and the State University of New York at Oswego. Residents of the homes on Otisco and Hoefler streets helped out as well.

Local businesses feel personally connected with Block Blitz because of the event’s dedication to bettering Syracuse’s less fortunate neighborhoods. Boyce Murtaugh, owner of Murtaugh Restoration, even earned the nickname ‘King of the Block’ because he is a frequent volunteer for Home HeadQuarters, Popp said.

Murtaugh and his fellow construction workers had their trucks parked along the streets of both locations, carried long planks of wood out of the trucks and then cut those pieces of wood with an electric saw.

The small group of SU students took direction from Block Blitz supervisors by painting porches and helping transport materials up and down the block.

While SU has always sponsored Block Blitz, this was the first year that students participated through the First-Year Experience program. Typically, Block Blitz is held during the summer and isn’t open to students, but Home HeadQuarters pushed back the date of event to accommodate SU’s academic calendar, said Forrest Ball, senior political science and economics major and student coordinator for Block Blitz.

As an intern at Home HeadQuarters last summer, Ball helped facilitate the partnership between Home HeadQuarters and SU by working with Greg Victory, the former director of the Office of First-Year and Transfer Programs. Ball thought that Block Blitz would be an effective way of familiarizing students with the Syracuse area.

‘Students are able to get a better sense of what Syracuse is all about,’ Ball said. ‘It’s kind of easy to think that it’s just the hill, and there’s so much more than that.’

The Office of First-Year and Transfer Programs advertised Block Blitz on Facebook, Twitter and first-year campus organizations. Students were able to sign up online. Ball hopes that students who enjoyed Block Blitz will continue to do community service within the city of Syracuse.

‘There’s so many ways for students to get off the hill and get immersed in the community,’ he said.

SU freshmen had the option of participating in Block Blitz as part of their First-Year Experience program, the shared experience that the university wants all first-year students to have. The university wanted students to start off their first year at SU with an activity that reflects the ideals of SU’s commitment to Scholarship in Action, said Ball.

One hundred students from the Class of 2015 were expected to volunteer at Block Blitz, Jackson said. Only 15 SU students participated.

Julie Saltisiak, a freshman newspaper and online journalism and English and textual studies major, took a bus provided by SU to Otisco Street right after she got out of class on Friday.

‘I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity before, so Block Blitz fits my interests perfectly,’ Saltisiak said.

Other First-Year Experience options included white-water rafting and attending various on-campus lectures and movie screenings.

‘I think Block Blitz is a better option,’ said freshman anthropology major Alejandra Avina. ‘It exposes different sides of Syracuse.’

Deborah Bell, a 25-year resident of Hoefler Street, called Block Blitz a ‘blessing’ and said that she wouldn’t have been able to afford her new shed without the help of Home HeadQuarters. Bell’s neighbor, Victoria Wade, who has lived in Skunk City for four years, appreciated the landscaping done by the Block Blitz volunteers. The two women agreed that Block Blitz efforts helped enhance the neighborhood exponentially.

‘From today on, the neighborhood is probably going to grow,’ Bell said.

Carmon said he hopes to continue renovating her home with the gardening skills Block Blitz volunteers taught her.

She credited Block Blitz with bringing beauty back to her area and said that, like the residents of Skunk City, her Near Westside neighborhood is on the brink of transformation.

She said: ‘I heard that there’s not a lot of homeowners in this neighborhood, but that’s about to change.’

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Published on September 18, 2011 at 12:00 pm