On a street making headlines, residents try to cultivate good news

“I’m probably the number-one complainer on this street but sometimes, you just have to get some verbs going on in your life and pick up some trash.”

Libby Macphail says she loves Bigelow Crescent. She has lived here since 2021 and is raising a family here.

But the street keeps making news headlines for the wrong reasons.

Earlier this year, two people were shot and killed on Bigelow. Police connected the double homicide to the drugs trade.

Last weekend, a car was set on fire outside someone’s house in suspicious circumstances. Just around the corner, a block away, a family’s townhome burned.

On Saturday morning, Macphail and seven other residents gathered just after 10am to try to cultivate some better news. Equipped with gloves, bags, coffee and toques, they began trawling Bigelow for trash.

“As you can see, we have a pretty great little neighbourhood,” Macphail said at the start of the clean-up.

“But I would say that there’s quite the divide between this side of the street and the other side of the street, and I feel that to be very, very unfortunate. I want to start to break that divide across the street. And I feel what’s better than picking up trash?”

One obvious difference between the two sides of the street is that, in this central stretch of Bigelow, one side is private housing and the other is public.

Macphail knows that divide can be a sensitive one. She hoped Saturday’s clean-up might be an opportunity to take a first step by inviting people out and jointly tidying up.

Among the people heading off among the houses with garbages bags were Caitlin Cleveland, the NWT’s education and industry minister, and her assistant, Leslie Straker. Bigelow Crescent is wedged into the top corner of Cleveland’s Kam Lake electoral district.

“I hear a lot of residents wanting to do what they can to ensure that Bigelow is a safe and clean space for families to live and play and work in. I think that’s what today is about, a community coming together in order to make that possible,” Cleveland said.

She thinks starting by cleaning the street can pay broader dividends.

“The more that we show up for each other and show up for our neighbours, the more the group grows. More people come out, more people participate. So I think it’s important that we come out,” the MLA said.

“I can remember, as a child, my parents getting together with neighbours in order to mend fences, so to speak. And that was what Saturday mornings looked like, then off everybody went to their own activities. I think it’s important that we hang on to some of those old-school ways.”

“I hope it allows people to come down and say hello,” Macphail said, adding that she had some inspiration from within her own family.

“My mother-in-law is the number-one trash picker-upper and has been forever. And so she’s very proud of me for the fact that I am out here picking up trash,” she said.

“When she comes to visit, she’s always out in the stroller picking up garbage. It’s just one of those little tasks you can do that improves your neighbourhood and gets you out and about, saying hello.

“It’s a little bit of fresh air and, yeah, a little bit of pride and dignity going on in the neighbourhood.”