Charles Heath, a supervisor with Downtown Dallas Inc’s Clean Team, steered his Ford F-150 toward Pacific Plaza, where a dispatcher had sent his crew to the children’s play area.
“This is one of those calls that we come to that is not a loved call,” Heath, 51, said.
He pulled on blue latex gloves and grabbed an empty trash bag. Benjamin X. Thomas, a clean team crew member, and Juan Wicks, the team’s landscaping supervisor, walked with him toward the playground, scanning the benches.
“There it is right there,” Thomas said, pointing out the target: brown feces, smeared across a concrete bench.
It took at least three rounds of Pine-Sol, water and scrubbing before the bench was clean.
Nearly five hours after the start of his 7 a.m. shift, Heath climbed back into his truck after a stop at a downtown 7-Eleven and took a long drink from a 1-liter bottle of water.
That morning, Heath, Wicks and Thomas had already unloaded bags of garbage, suitcases, a stroller and a sofa cushion from Heath’s truck. They cut weeds growing through a sidewalk, blew away the debris and swept it up. After Pacific Plaza, they headed to Civic Park to collect more trash.
“We’ll never win the fight,” he said, “but we’re always in the battle.”
Four blocks away, Lorenzo Garduño Martinez, 60, stepped back from a construction site on South Harwood Street, pulled off his gloves and wiped sweat from his forehead with his shirt. Despite the heat, he wore long sleeves as he worked, waterproofing a leaking building.
By afternoon, chunks of asphalt had given way to fine gray dust. Slowly and methodically, the floor shed its old surface until nothing remained but polished concrete, ready for a fresh layer that, once finished, would conceal every trace of labor beneath it.