Just about every time Frederick Stahl, Matt Barber, and Anthony Masucci sweep their block of Iseminger Street in South Philly, someone stops them with a question or asks to take their picture.
That’s how I found out about these street-sweeping South Philly dads, when someone posted a photo of Stahl doing his thing on Facebook and a friend tagged me in the comments.
“This is the most fundamental level of environmentalism,” the photo was captioned.
At first, I had to squint my eyes. I couldn’t tell what Stahl was pushing. It looked like a street sweeper, but it was yellow and fun-sized. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I dropped my email in the comments, hoping to learn more.
And so, when Stahl and I finally connected this month — more than a year after that photo was posted — I went down to his block to check it out.
“I’d be remiss not to include two of my neighbors — Matt Barber and Anthony Masucci,” Stahl wrote to me prior to our meeting. “I actually moved to Iseminger in 2020, and it was their street sweepers that inspired me to get one myself.”
On their classic South Philly block, which boasts a Tofani door or two and a street so narrow you’re inclined to suck your gut in while you’re driving down it, there are 18 kids under the age of 14 and eight under the age of 3, including Stahl’s 1-year-old son.
“Those are the ones that really touch the concrete,” he said of the little tykes.
The guys used to sweep the street with janitor brooms, “just so our kids could come out and play without glass around,” Masucci said.
“Neighbors would be like, ‘Oh, it’s nice, but it’s really dusty,’ and I’d be like, ‘God! There’s gotta be a better way,’” he said.
During the COVID lockdowns in 2020, when Masucci had some extra time on his hands, he went searching online and stumbled upon the website for Kärcher, a German company that sells cleaning equipment. The company’s S 4 Twin model, which claims to sweep large areas up to five times quicker than a push broom, seemed like it might do the trick.
“I found this thing and all of the marketing is for driveways, like old men kind of brushing their long driveways in the suburbs,” Masucci said. “I was like, ‘I think this would work fantastic. It’s like a little Zamboni. Let me see what we can do.’”
Masucci purchased one — which typically retails for $189.99 but is currently on sale for $125.36 — and donated it to the block. Barber offered to keep it on his back patio.
“Anthony came through and made the dream happen and we put it together,” Barber said.
“It was like Christmas,” Masucci said. “Oh my God, the first time going up and down, we’re like, ‘It’s filled! It’s filled and it works so cleanly and easily!’”
The guys all grew up watching their dads mow the lawn every weekend, and even though they don’t have lawns to mow in South Philly, using the sweepers felt a little like that, they told me. Stahl even bought his own Kärcher when his little one was on the way.
“We love the community and you feel great coming out here and doing it so much more efficiently than brushing around,” Masucci said. “The kids run out. They wanna help you push it. Everyone runs out and wants to help you bag it up. So becomes is a community thing.”
Barber even gets the kids to pull weeds from the sidewalk and throw them into the street so he can sweep them up, promising them water ice from around the corner if they help out.
“I go, ‘Listen, weeds for water ice,’” he said.
Kärcher’s S 4 Twin unit is lightweight, foldable, has an adjustable handle, and uses no electricity or gas, so it makes no noise.
“It runs on human will,” Masucci said.
Its 5.25-gallon waste bin holds an impressive amount of debris and doesn’t blow up much dust. After the guys dumped it out following four passes along their street, the trash bag they emptied it into weighed about 15-20 pounds.
“This bag will be so heavy at the end. I always feel like it’s a real proud moment,” Barber said.
Mostly they’re sweeping up dirt, debris, broken glass, nails, and cigarette butts. It takes about 20 minutes and four or five passes to clean the block.
The day after trash and recycling collection is particularly bad — there’s some stuff that misses the truck or glass that gets broken on its way in — so they make sure to do it then.
Some items will get stuck in the Kärcher, like flattened water bottles and dog poop bags, so they still have to pick up that stuff by hand (with gloves on!) before they do a pass.
The few times they’ve been unable to repair the device, they said Kärcher customer service has been amazing and sent them replacement parts and even a whole new unit for free.
When the dads first started using the Kärcher, one of their neighbors on the block, a South Philly lifer who threw his cigarette butts in the street, raised an eyebrow.
“He was like, ‘Yo man, what, what are you doing? Why are you out here always cleaning the street?” Barber recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know, man. I just consider it my backyard.”
Not long after, that neighbor stopped throwing his cigarettes in the street, they said.
“It’s little stuff like that. Maybe it’s always what they did and now hopefully we’re raising awareness,” Masucci said. “If you’re in the city and living here you can impact a lot. You do rely on public works, and if the street light goes out we can’t go fix that, but this is something you can do.”
Being stewards of their street has also bought them a lot of equity with their neighbors, they said. The block holds three major parties a year, including one where they chuck pumpkins off the roofs of their rowhouses, and they get little pushback from anyone.
“We can be up late, blast the music and throw those crazy parties. Everybody knows we’re gonna mess stuff up, but we’re gonna clean it up, because in the end, nobody cares more than us,” Masucci said.
The men would love to see more people in Philly get Kärchers, perhaps through a citywide program, and so would I. Philly has a notorious litter problem — I don’t have to tell you that — but when people become invested in their neighborhood and cleaning their block becomes a fun, easy, community activity instead of just a chore, it’s much more likely to happen.
“They have all these initiatives to clean up Philly and I’m like, if every block captain was given one of these and they just let people take responsibility for their block, you’d probably see a bit of a difference in terms of the litter and cleanliness of South Philly,” Barber said.