How TWO MEN AND A JUNK TRUCK Helped Reclaim Esther Williams' Evanston Home

When a Community Shows Up: The Love Your Block Story

Junk removal is what we do. But every so often, a job reminds us why we do it.

This month, we teamed up with Love Your Block Evanston to help a neighbor who'd been carrying more than anyone should have to carry alone.

Love Your Block Evanston is a mini-grant program funded by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins, run in partnership with the City of Evanston. Residents nominate their neighbors, other residents review the applications, and the projects with the most need get funded. This round, 21 were selected.

Esther Williams was one of them.

Her daughter, Deanna, submitted the application. For years, it was Esther's husband Paul and her son Christopher who kept up the house and yard. Then, in February 2025, Paul died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 74. Four weeks later, Christopher died of organ failure. He was only 39.

Losing two family members in a month doesn't just break your heart. It leaves things undone and cluttered. The backyard became one of those things: half-finished projects, debris piling up, a space that just sat there as a reminder of everyone who used to take care of it.

Bridget Johnson, one of the organizers with Love Your Block Evanston, put it simply. The community knew what Esther had been through, and they wanted to not only give her yard back, but peace of mind as well.

When the City of Evanston put $100,000 behind the program, we wanted in. We donated a dumpster and sent our own people to haul alongside neighbors, clearing out a year's worth of accumulated grief, basically, one load at a time.

Our guy Jacob Milam worked the site that day. He's been doing this a long time, and he said he'd never seen anything like it: a whole neighborhood just showing up for one woman. He said it gave him hope.

By the end of the day, the yard was clear. But what really changed was smaller and bigger than that. Deanna said her mother could finally imagine what came next, not just a clean yard, but room to breathe again.

CBS Chicago covered the story on July 10, 2026, as part of a look at how Love Your Block Evanston is changing things one block and one family at a time.

We're just glad we got to be part of this one.