A TIRELESS Spring!

Written by Justin DiBerardinis, TTF Watershed Partnership Executive Director. Originally written for the May 2025 Newsletter

It’s been a season of team building, of growth. A season of more.

Growth is exciting, full of possibilities. Growth is exhausting—an additional labor on top of already busy spring days. It can’t be perpetual (there must also be times to organize, and to rest…), but it happens in surges, faster than you’d like. It happens when you need it the most.

It is incredibly rewarding to see the formation of a new TTF. Not just new individual members (Welcome Drew! Welcome Cesali!), but a new us. We are different together. We are new. New ideas of what TTF is and can be, how we work, and what we are capable of. New ideas of what is possible for Tacony Creek Park.

NO MORE TIRES!

We set a goal for this year—a big one: NO MORE TIRES IN TACONY CREEK PARK! No more abandoned cars. No more dumping.

If you know Tacony Creek Park, you know that’s a big, big goal. But now, I think, TTF is big enough for the job. To keep it clean, we first must make it clean, dumping attracts dumping, tires attract more tires. (These piles have a malignant gravity; they swiftly morph and grow.) But if we make it clean and keep it clean, we can then achieve a change in perception, and over time, a change in culture. The Park won’t be a landfill anymore.

Through the winter and the early months, we got the small piles, cleared the dumps, snapped up the new ones before they could collect more. And we made plans, rallied our partners, and built a big team to go after the big one.

The Big One.
5,000 tires. Dumped in the night, from a ridge, from the SEPTA tracks.
5,000 tires. 100 tons of rubber, with no path or road.
Daunting, but not hopeless.

We had a great team—not just TTF and our volunteers, but Parks and Rec, the Water Department, the Streets Department, and the Office of Clean and Green. And the relentless clean-up warriors of United By Blue.

When so many groups come together, the spirit, the positivity, the hope—it has a gravity, too. It attracts more and more and more.

The clean-up in April was a wet, muddy, joyful labor. So many strangers working side by side to achieve something difficult, tangible, and meaningful. The roar that reverberated in the creek valley when the last tire was out it’s locked in my ears. A peal of triumph and joy.

If we stick with it—if this coalition for Tacony Creek Park stays together—then the (seemingly) impossible will happen.

Tacony Creek Park will be new. Clean. Cared for. Thriving. It won’t be a place for tires. It will be a place for trees and flowers and foxes and deer and all the creatures that fly and swim and crawl upon the earth. A place for people to leave the city within the city, to hear water and touch grass, and feel free.

It’s possible. It’s begun.

See you at the next Clean Up!

— Justin DiBerardinis, TTF Watershed Partnership Executive Director