Charles Heath, a supervisor with Downtown Dallas Inc\u2019s Clean Team, steered his Ford F-150 toward Pacific Plaza, where a dispatcher had sent his crew to the children\u2019s play area.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of those calls that we come to that is not a loved call,\u201d Heath, 51, said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s landscaping supervisor, walked with him toward the playground, scanning the benches.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere it is right there,\u201d Thomas said, pointing out the target: brown feces, smeared across a concrete bench.<\/p>\n
It took at least three rounds of Pine-Sol, water and scrubbing before the bench was clean. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
That morning, Heath, Wicks and Thomas had already unloaded bags of garbage, suitcases, a stroller and a sofa cushion from Heath\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll never win the fight,” he said, “but we\u2019re always in the battle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four blocks away, Lorenzo Gardu\u00f1o 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charles Heath, a supervisor with Downtown Dallas Inc\u2019s Clean Team, steered his Ford F-150 toward Pacific Plaza, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,3205,430,3731],"class_list":["post-402097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-heat","tag-north-texas","tag-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}