A QUESTION OF DIRT. An Appeal to the Council.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 272, 16 September 1905, Page 6

A QUESTION OF DIRT. An Appeal to the Council.

IT would pay the City Council to give half-a-dozen good strong washerwomen a good strong joib. The ladies would need to have powerful constitutions, they would have to be not squeamish, and they had better take their smelling-salts with them. Wellington was the dirtiest city outside Port Said before the roads were wood-blocked. Wellington was polished up a bit then, but since then it has 1 been as dirty as circumstances will permit. • * * If you want a real nauseous morning, stroll round the passenger waiting hutches along the tram route. They are nearly always in a most disgusting condition, and absolutely unfit for publication. No decent person could stand them for five minutes. Every one of them should be hosed down every day, and disinfected. The one nearest the tram head-quarters is usually quite beyond description. It could only be ade>quately pen-pictured with a bucket of mud and a broom. # * * The pavement round Martin's Fountain is in such a position that most of the refuse from the Quay blows there, and lodges against the Union Bank. It stays there for weeks on end, and is a menace and an eyesore to the people of the city. Usually there is a billow of wastepaper piled up against the Post Office. Nobody seems to care. Have a look again at the ex-avenue between Kent and Cambridge Terraces — the most awful public fester in New Zealand. * * • A manure heap in the centre of this "reserve," and further up, towards the Basin, a long, ugly ditch nearly always filled with dirty water, and on each side a dilapidated fence. The private streets are paradises in comparison with this pubhc "recreation" ground. Why is it that the last City Council never fought dirt, and that the present one never sees it ? Why should the eyes of the people be offended with these evidences of neglect and dirt ? Any person who could sit in most of the tram waitingrooms fifteen minutes without be>coming ill deserves the cross for valour. It isn't much to ask that the city should be kept ordinarily clean — as clean as the city insists that householders' shall keep their back-yards. Some public spots in Wellington would shame the worst back-yard that ever existed.