New York Today: Complaints of Dirty Streets

Almost Spring
--MF and RC

rain
in bouts
in bursts

it’s coming

by it’s i mean
today’s pop and blush
today’s modest ringing, like the little silver bells dangling from my lips
tufted voice, swirling into you—
never before have you heard
such a thing

rain
in bouts—in bursts
color
in pools—in patches

buckle
buckle up!

around the time
the sun is noticed by our average citizen
noticed for its long light and heavy hand
and grateful for darkness
and rage in the streets
around then my tongue also creeps
into a heavy drawl and breathy pulsing pause,
creeps slow as a salted snail
jowl over tongue
licked tooth and hot wind
almost sleeping, almost every word trailing…

rain
in bouts—in bursts
color
in pools—in patches

these edges
are like the weight of a storm,
or the feel of tar and wax
the slippery noise i make this time of year
tripping once again towards you my dear—
the sound of it bids you to dream
of
rain in bouts—in bursts
color in pools—in patches

staccato of spring

$13 a pack? I was raised not to be a smoker, but recall when they were 60 cents and sold in high school dormitory vending machines.

well, I was fortunate to go on trip of my life: Japan for two weeks last november.
tokyo, kyoto, nagano (snow monkeys!)
streets, taxis, subways, rail trains, etc were spotless
rail train? there are workers who wait on platform & quickly work as a team to clean cars & car bathrooms, empty trash @ each stop.

public restrooms & those toilets ...! spotless because everyone cares, I guess.

clean & courteous
flew ANA, the airport was shiny clean

get back to nyc? ~blech~ terminal, curbs, horns blaring, people pushing etc etc

i'm picking up neighbors trash in bayside. why do people throw pizza box w/crust & old slice on. the. curb?
or when taking out plastic bag of garbage, let spaghetti spill on sidewalk & ignore? but make a show of shaking out comforter each morning on flowery stoop?

was up all night because rats are screaming in the back, feral cats & possums sulking around.
this is a new building & not cheap, a few blocks off bell blvd.
landlord does his best, sends notices regularly & drives by everyday to keep up.

but, *people* :(

sorry, not a *first world person*, 62 yr old grandmother just doing my best in this weird world ...

Compared to other Western cities New York is filthiest. Our subways are a disgrace. Garbage everywhere. People using the platform as a toilet. Look at the station for the 7 line at Grand Central. The ceiling is covered by mold which is a health hazard. People just throw garbage anywhere and ignore trash bins. Compare this to Paris especially the subway. Spotless. The clean up crews can not do it alone. Bluntly, the modern New York is an ugly dirty city. The grandeur of pre-Trump NYC has given way to souless glass towers only occupied by the rich. Buildings screaming look at me look at me I am cute void of any class, forming environmentally damaging canyons of greed.

New York has ALWAYS been a dirty city, from the 1960s through until now. Things DID improve a bit in the 1980s, when the City's fiances improved to pay for more collections, more workers, new bins, etc. And maybe a bit, in some places, in the 2000s. But the amount or rubbish and general junk in the streets, on the sidewalks, and in the gutters is amazing. Also in crevices in pavement and particularly in/around those Bloomberg-era bike/car planter-dividers (which seem to have been designed with no thought of collection holes and gaps where rubbish lodges.)

But all that said, when you travel in virtually every other city in the world, you cannot help but notice how CLEAN they generally are compared to even the "cleanest" streets in NYC (and that's highly variable of course). This is true of large cities, smaller cities and larger towns, even in less affluent, non-touristy locales.

And of course in almost all of Europe, much of South America and some other cities in the US, the trash cans are (sturdy) plastic of some sort, so they make much LESS NOISE when trash is collected, even by huge machines and garbage trucks.

I'd really like to see a dog owner get slapped with a ticket for not cleaning after their dog. In 25 years I have never seen it happen. My block is covered in dog feces. Repeated complaints to 311 do nothing.

It was one of the cleanest, most pleasant cities in the world until DeBlasio and his political correctness came along. But of course people have a right to defecate in the streets, throw their garbage everywhere and be as much of a vagrant as they desire.

The same mentality that permits one to toss garbage on the street from a bus or car window or dropped on the sidewalk whee one finishes with it, is the same thinking that is at the root of most of the city's ills.

People seem to think there are imaginary garbage cans in the street, on the sidewalks and on the subways, because they always dump their papers and food wrappers there. If it wasn't there when you got there, it shouldn't be there when you leave. Nobody is to blame for the garbage but the people who put it there.

I was in Zurich recently and was amazed at the cleaning forces that were out early in the morning: mini-trucks with high-pressured water cleaners on sidewalks everywhere, workers with brooms picking up litter alongside the graveled walkways by the river, and other strategies. It was an all-hands-on-deck approach and the city looked great as a result.

Our elected leaders have learned from other cities in areas of bike sharing, transportation, etc. - how about a trip to Switzerland to see how cleanliness is handled there?

New Yorkers are judged to be the third most
neurotic people in the country. --news item

EIGHT MILLION COUCHES

Third? That's all? And which are the other two?
Studies demeaning our city can't be true.

Washington, D.C.? San Francisco?
Comparing a kiddie skating rink to a disco.

Boston? Los Angeles? Second City Chicago?
Everlastingly, impossibly no!

New York City's six million neurotics
Thrive, along with another two million psychotics.

Point to any syndrome or loony complex,
New Yorkers have it, every dad-and-momplex.

Any way you look at the shrinker game,
Neurosis surely is our middle name.

Live here? The self-disrepecting are hot to;
He or she or they'd be crazy not to.

Those of us who were kids in the 60s & 70s were indoctrinated by the anti-litter campaign and it worked! I'll never forget the ad with the Indian paddling a canoe down the garbage-strewn river. Then, close-up on his face, we see a tear run down his cheek. No one wanted to be a litterbug after that!

Hope that the NY Times can do more extensive reporting on garbage and trash issues.

Trash cans are overflowing on many streets in Manhattan much due to the increase in tourists, increase in street food venues and increase in development. Same thing in Central Park.

Quite incredible to see folks piling their garbage onto already overflowing trash cans....

Overdevelopment - luxury housing and hotels - on the narrow streets of the Wall Street area (particularly along Fulton, William, Nassau, John Streets) has resulted in piles of garbage on the narrow sidewalks, making it impossible to walk on the sidewalk and paving way for nightly rat festivities.

Apparently there is no NYC zoning/land use requirement for developers to address/include in new high-rise development?

I walk the streets
Pulsating and at the same time static
Arteries that transport those en route to a destination, known or to be revealed
Their dance, instinctive as hordes clash along crosswalks without ever touching
And the lifeblood itself is but so varied
She walks for freedom, to go as far as she can get
He walks because time is money, in which case he might not walk at all
Many walk reluctantly, conscious of their navigating unwelcoming spaces
Some walk because nature calls, they long for the wild in a city where capitalism commands order
And I walk to observe this grand choreography unfold in the most democratic of spaces, hoping for a glimpse of worlds colliding
And when it occurs; when New York hurls a stranger onto the very space you occupy, prompting haphazard interaction, the world might stand still for such an exposure; such contact
In the end, we resume to walk

Notice that the crosswalk, curb and street in Sam Hadgeon's accompanying photo are relatively clean. The image is of a bin overflowing. We should take heart from this. it shows that there is generally an impulse on the part of New Yorkers to place trash in a receptacle when was is provided. And they are ingenious about it! Look at the can carefully tucked away in the handle of the can next to the sign that says, "Litter Only."

There are three alternative solutions to this problem: 1. Remove the litter can (believe it or not this is what some Sanitation workers might suggest. 2. Increase the pick up frequency by Sanitation. 3. Have a local service (BID or other) place liners in the can, and bag items when full, replacing the liner. (Providing larger cans will simply increase the weight and tempt the insertion of large objects like tires the City won't want in a litter can).

For those of you criticizing Sanitation workers: did any of you ever spend the day picking up 55 gallon containers and emptying them in a truck in 90º weather? The pay starts at about $33k as year but, if you last 5.5 years the average w/overtime jumps to $88K. Tell me about how your body and back feels after one week of that, let alone several years. Though I'm sure we'll hear a proposal from a company soon enough willing to provide a robot that can perform this service if it is allowed to have their bot broadcast loud advertisements while it is performing its task of trash removal.

Staten Island Sonnet
Gary Glazner

For a new job- Frankie and Billy moved from Oklahoma with little Gary.
My first memory is the Staten Island Ferry.
Tyson Street, New Dorp, was where we could afford to live.
At night catching magic in a jar- the yellow light fireflies give.
Our home was a 4-plex, red brick, apartment house.
Early morning cartoons- Crusader Rabbit and Mighty Mouse.
The first day, I said, “Yall wanna play?” My new pals beat me up.
Threw my imaginary friend GeeGo, into the Hudson in a coke cup.
PF Flyers said run faster, jump higher, I jumped face first into a brick wall.
It was 1961- Maris and Mantle, knocking mighty homerun balls.
Little Jodie next door said, “If you kiss me, I won’t tell.”
Red hair and freckles, “Gary kissed me! Gary kissed me!” She would yell.
Cracking open my chin, falling on a rock near the Zoo, in Central Park.
Watching fresh white snow, turn city black, sooty and dark.

With all due appreciation to Mr. Ciprian and Ms. Santos for their candor, along with a realization that they were simply the two New Yorkers who had the misfortune to be quoted in this piece, comes a simple request:

As regards tossing empty bottles out your cab window/on the ground:

Please don't ever do that again.

Thank you.

Maybe if the city and local businesses provided a few more trash cans, we would have cleaner streets. Instead they are being penny wise, pound foolish by actually reducing the number of trash cans available. There is a price to be paid for everything. They don't want to pay to empty the trash cans so everyone pays with dirtier streets.

we were raised to never litter. in fact, most people i know raised in NY shame others who throw trash on the street. the outdoors of NY are as much our home as the indoors, and it is each person's responsibility to throw away our own trash properly. that being said, it's evident in this article, and in life, that an astonishing number of people don't care for much past the next breath they are about to take. littering is habit to them and they don't even perceive the filth they create or the filth around them. we're lucky to have our sanitation department.

Teach your children...these habits start early.

I regularly see garbage trucks, on their route of collecting trash from the sidewalk rubbish bins, drive from one block to the next and literally spill a large fraction of the previously collected garbage onto the road. It looks terrible. Since we know how to go to the Moon, perhaps we can learn to design garbage trucks that don't spill garbage? And, for that matter, make litter bins that don't spill over in a gust of wind? These two contributors to the litter situation in NYC are much larger than a few individual people throwing junk on the ground.

Streets could be cleaner in Northern Manhattan. Abandoned bikes all over.

In my neighborhood, variously called the Upper Upper West Side or Manhattan Valley, the answer to the litter mess was quite simple. Enforce the law and get those store owners to take responsibility for the space in front of their establishments. I'm not usually in favor of slapping people with fines, but, honestly, it worked here. It's still not the prettiest stretch of Broadway where I live, but the sidewalks are much cleaner.

The Wisdom of Experience

I'm old enough to have fixed

a few things.

A running toilet.

A squeaky door.

A bird feeder, fallen off its perch.

A child's toy,

though it took a while.

Some were easy.

But there were hard ones, too.

A broken friendship,

in need of apology.

Angry words -

spoken in haste,

needing to be taken back.

That was tricky.

How do you unsay something?

Try not to do that.

Better not to say it

in the first place.

And I'm old enough to know

that some things

can't be fixed.

A broken heart, for example,

is broken for ever.

Unrequited love is just that -

and will never be repaired.

Some things, you see,

are healed by the proper tool

and serious effort.

Some by time.

And some broken things

we take to our graves

with us like a pharaoh's cats -

buried alive and crying out,

despite their royal birth.

My neighborhood, the Upper East Side, has that wonderful group, Ready Willing and Able empty the trashcans on the sidewalks, on every avenue EXCEPT Second Avenue. Numerous people have asked for years our city council person, Ben Kallos, the get Ready, Willing and Able working on Second Avenue.

He has categorically ignored all requests. The Trash cans on Second Avenue are overflowing, yet this "representative" does nothing. Maybe this article will wake him up ~ BUT I truly doubt it.

Yankees box White Sox

San Francisco has banned the use of plastic bags. Why doesn't New York do the same? Obviously this would not change all the apparently atrocious trash habits of the residents, buy it may help.

I've been fortunate enough to have travelled the world, and have spent time in some "under-developed" as well as "western" countries where dropping one's trash in the street was pretty common parctice. The difference was/is that they have actual STREET SWEEPERS, guys with brooms. shovels, and bins cleanning up! Consequently the streets are "broom clean"...and there are jobs for working class people. Instead of spending 100,00's of thousands on mechanized street sweepers that sort of get the road and gutter clean, how about bringing back sanitation'men' like NYC used to have. I seems to work well were they are currently deploped, like in downtown Brooklyn.

To tie together two strands of this "Today":

Close some of the so-called Smoke Shops, which double in many places as money-laundering and drug-dealing establishments, and get rid of the guys who hang around there waiting for business, and you'll see fewer bottles, food wrappers, and cigarette butts tossed on the street not just in front of the store but also along the adjacent areas.

These establishments are well known to the communities they're in, and most of us want them shut down. In our neighborhood, we had two drug-related murders in front of one, in the space of about half a year.

After visiting NYC for the very first time this month, I would agree that amount of garbage is astonishing.

I think City is lacking enough garbage bins on the streets. In some areas you can walk for two blocks without seeing one garbage bin. And bins that were there are usually very small and overflowing with garbage.

The complaint one hears often, to compare the efficiency, and lack of corruption, of a government, is how good it is to clean its garbage off the streets. It must include, of course, education in civics, while providing the means to dispose of our waste, so the public participates in carrying it out. The simplest example of that is when you see an individual, riding in a bus, throwing the peel of a banana into the street, seemingly unperturbed by it. Oh well, lets keep trying, both the city administration and ourselves, to pick things up in a timely fashion. But do not expect perfection from imperfect human beings, by a mile.

Re the In the News item -
Can a $2.50 increase which goes to the seller really help the smoking problem?

Tune of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

They asked Bill what to do
What path to pursue
So what he had to say:
They will stay away
If they have to pay.

He said with fingers crossed
Habits will get tossed
Just increase the cost
Then they'll be thinking twice
Smoke's not worth the price.

We may laugh
Can two and a half
Dollars change what gets spent?
Could this cure
Not decrease the lure
While helping the one percent?

So merchants wish him well
All the stores that sell
Will make out like hell
So will this plan suffice
Will they lose this vice
Smoke's not worth the price.

Before New York, i was been living in Trier, germany, a small town of 75 000 inhabitant close to the border with France and Luxembourg. You cannot imagine the earthquake when i arrived in these open field garbage bean. Every day i see the lack of public-spirit: a bus driver who throws his empty can on the road, the child who leaves the package of his sweets of the skate in the front of his fathers eyes, the businessman who has not the time to cross the street to put the end of his sandwich in the bean.
And i don't speak about walking on the coast-shore : it looks like Morocco, without the kindness of the locals

Wow! Just dropping trash or throwing it out the window. How is the interior of your home treated? Take off shoes, plastic on the sofa?
Inexcusable behavior.

Nice touch. The Dead

Really? It's easier to just drop your trash on the ground or throw it out your window? I cannot imagine the pigsty these people must live in at home if that's their thinking. How lazy and rude.

Walk the Coles Street pedestrian bridge, which connects Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, it's filthy. Oft neglected by DOT for clean up of trash and snow. Does not matter there are schools on either side and is a major pedestrian commuter point.