Chestnut Hill, one of Philadelphia's most affluent and best-kept neighborhoods, faces an untidy predicament: random litter tossed from moving cars, resulting in a chronic scourge of trash along Cresheim Valley Drive.

And now an anonymous crusader, armed with wit and a handful of signs, has taken action. The stretch of green-edged roadway from Germantown Avenue to Emlen Street now boasts a series of small green and white placards, each more pointed than the last.

"Why are you littering here?" the first sign innocently inquires, as if genuinely puzzled by the human predilection for mindlessly tossing refuse out a car window. Subsequent signs offer possible explanations, each more sardonic than the last. "I don't care about my city," proclaims one, channeling the inner monologue of some unknown offender. Another gets more pointed, suggesting a probable lack of maturity: "Mommy still cleans up after me." The pièce de résistance comes on the final sign, which declares, in true Philadelphia form, "I'm compensating for my small jawn" — a statement both hyper-local and universally cutting.

Anne McNiff, executive director of the Chestnut Hill Community Association, said she has no idea who could be behind this act of civic remonstration. But she approves of the novel approach to street cleanliness.

"I love those signs," she said. "Anything that would deter littering on that stretch of area, anything that would work is great, and I think it's a unique and creative way to get the message across."

In a city that has spent decades earning the unfortunate moniker of "Filthadelphia," Cresheim Valley Drive — dotted with the detritus of hasty meals and convenience store runs — is hardly among the worst of Philadelphia's dumping grounds.

Citywide, the problem is so bad that officials have devised a "Litter Index" to help monitor transgressions. It rates litter and other forms of illegal dumping on a scale from 1 to 4 — with a rating of 1 indicating an area so pristine one could eat off the sidewalk (though we wouldn't recommend it), while a 4 suggests a landscape so despoiled it might take heavy machinery to clean it all up.

Down on the 6200 block of Germantown Avenue, for instance, the lot behind the recently shuttered Rite Aid store had quickly accumulated so much trash that newly elected State Rep. Andre D. Carroll had to organize some heavy equipment to come and pick it up.

Mayor Cherelle Parker has optimistically declared her intention to tackle this mess and transform Philadelphia into "the cleanest, greenest big city in the nation."

She reiterated that claim at the Mt. Airy Business Improvement District's (BID) annual meeting on Oct. 7.

Ken Weinstein, board chair of Mt. Airy's BID, put it this way: "In 2016, when business districts around the city that did not have BIDs were full of trash and litter, Cherelle convinced the city council to spend $10 million a year, yes, $10 million a year for her PHL Taking Care of Business program that still exists." 

Unlike the unfortunate Rite Aid lot, Cresheim Valley Drive is marked in the yellow zone of this index, which means that city officials estimate the amount of litter "can be collected by a single person" — as if a lone city worker, armed with nothing but a pointy stick and a bin bag, would ever be tasked with the job.

A chronic problem

The Friends of the Cresheim Trail, a volunteer group that supports the stretch of green from Stenton Avenue to Emlen Street, regularly picks up after their less considerate neighbors. The group typically partners with the Streets Department, which sometimes provides trash trucks, so they can just walk along behind the moving truck and toss the bagged refuse into it.

"I don't know what it is that compels people to throw things out their car window, but we're never at a loss for trash when we have cleanups," Bradley Maule, the president of Friends of the Cresheim Trail, told the Local.

Maule thinks the signs are clever, and they make him smile. But he doesn't think they'll deter any future litterbugs.

"People who litter, are people who litter," Maule said. Quoting the late Phillies president David Montgomery, he added, "Nobody wants to be the first person to litter, but anybody will also litter."

Maule said he's come to accept that a little litter always begets more litter — so while it's a never-ending job, it's still worth it.

"If you have a freshly clean Cresheim Valley Drive, perhaps you'll be less inclined to throw something out the window than if you see a bunch of litter on the road already and think, 'Well, what does it matter?'"

Maule and Friends of the Cresheim Trail are planning their cleanup of that section of the drive for later this year.

"We still need to confirm our permit to do it, but we're hoping to do it the first weekend of December," Maule said. "We're always open to new volunteers. We tend to have, I'd say, on average, we have about 15 to 20 volunteers that come out each month, but we always have new people.”