Or some people turn the trash into art on social media. Check out Instagram accounts @stilllife_nyc, @tylerivesnyc, and accounts from other cities that find sidewalk trash beautiful.
What “Greatest City in the World” can’t keep its streets half clean? Yuck. You can have it.
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Born & raised in Manhattan p, schooled on L.I. enjoy reading NY Today for number of years. However, the form has changed — too much detail in cover story. Reduce the words, write more about other items in NYC. Also the “Diary” is becoming bit pedestrian w/o any really good human interest stories, like the one today about person stopping after movie, listening to women talking, one drinking vodka, tonic, lime — boring, no punch, irrelevant to anything but taking up word space!!
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There should be dumpsters on every block, on every corner in NYC. Off the curb. Pretty standard in other cities with predominantly attached buildings.
One of the major sources of litter is torn bags while it is sitting on the street waiting for pickup. You have animals ripping open the bags and people either accidentally or intentionally tearing them.
Containerize it!
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I'd hate to have a permanent dumpster in front of where I live.
Can you imagine the stench in anything but frigid weather?
And what could be found there?
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I don't live in Queens. A few months ago, I had never heard of either Tiffany Cabán or Melinda Katz. But someone on Twitter wanted to know more about Cabán and asked how one learns about lawyers' backgrounds. At that point, I began to pay attention. I wondered why someone with relatively little experience felt so confident about running for this position. Cabán's mentor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seems to be a great success, but she is in a two-year position as a House Representative, so the risk is low. A four-year-term as a District Attorney carries many more responsibilities and requires more experience.
And then when Cabán didn't win, albeit quite narrowly, all her camp could do was cry fraud, despite a very time-consuming and expensive process undertaken to verify the votes.
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Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason addresses, among other things, both people's unwillingness to trust experts (hence the anti-vaxxers, the climate change deniers, the conspiracy theorists, the college students who know best) and their pride in their ignorance -- because since everyone's opinion is valid, all points of view are equal, and education is for elites, then there can be no experts.
Same with politics. Not that I'm fond of politicians, but it used to be that they (often) had law degrees and certainly experience in local and state politics, or had both and were governors or senators; and District Attorneys had law degrees and years of experience, having worked their way up.
Now someone with little experience comes along, loses, and cries foul.
With young progressives like Caban on the left and Trump and his attack dogs on the right, we're awash in inexperience and crass ambition.
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It's always a pleasure to read Corey Kilgannon - and the better writing in "New York Today" was instantly evident, even without my looking to see who wrote the column!
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@L
Corey's fine. So is Azi.
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I'm wondering whether whoever (maybe more than one person?) is the "Lou Grant" of New York Today has been here for all these years. Since I started following the column every single work day around the time the City Room was ending, summer 2015, there's been a reliability for our early morning comfort level no matter who the reporters have been,uet none of the predictability that often can come with reliability. I don't know whether Jonathan and Alexandra knew each other when they took over from Tatiana and Noah in Feb. 2016, but whoever had an instinct that new pairing would take what preceded it and grow it, then saw it and never flag in that quality for about 2-3/4 years, must have been proud it went that long quality-wise.
The research folk know what the clicks are for readership and if we read early or later in the morning as a group - but I'm guessing (pending someone writing their memoirs while I'm still alive) the whole news business had gone more hard news, and the column which also is a briefing for the bday had to reflect that. These days, I have to admit there are some mornings where the lead story is a tough hard-hitting topic that makes me wait until after coffee to dig in. But it also seems to be getting people commenting later and later in the day. I vote for whar keeps the column (and the Metro section) going longer as the whole paper seems to be aiming to get more international.
Out of space, I'll stop, LOL.
As a citizen of one of the municipalities that hosts a landfill dedicated to your excesses, let me say that I'm astounded you put up with this behavior. Why is it even LEGAL that you can put plastic bags of trash on the sidewalk - why isn't this an automatic
$1,000 fine? I mean, if you folks WANT to raise a master race of rats & pigeons, fine, but don't complain when you won't even make the effort to keep your trash away from vermin.
By the way, we're closing our dumps to out of town trash. Look elsewhere.
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You also have more people living on the streets or people who go to restaurants/bars late at night and dump their garbage wherever they feel like it. Look at the subway? The MTA can't be cleaning the cars all hours of the night when people use the trains or the homeless sleep there, although I have seen many people dressed very nicely have food or drinks with them in the morning and they think there's a garbage can under their seats because they push their wrappers, etc. under their seats as far as they can go. People in my area use the garbage cans on the streets for their own personal trash and cars have stopped across the street from my building and dumped their trash in the street for the building maintenance guys to clean up. People are disgusting and pigs.
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I think most people who resort to illegal dumping feel bad about it but simply cannot afford to pay the costs associated with disposing of bulky household items that are non-recyclable. If there was a free or very low cost way for them to have things disposed of properly, they would use it. It seems that NYC is already collecting the illegally dumped items anyway. Making it free and having everyone bring their bulky items to centralized collection points might even be cheaper than collecting surreptitiously dumped trash from the streets of the city.
Everybody has an incinerator (with a recycling bin) if they live in an apartment building or garbage cans (with recycling bins) if they live in a house. There is no reason to dump personal trash in the street or in a trash can that's on the street.
I'm wondering if "pneumatic tubes" may be more fun to sing than say.
Tune of “Always True to You In My Fashion”
We love shopping to excess
So our place becomes a mess.
When the mess brings lots of stress, that’s not okay.
So we always look for new things to put our trash in
‘Cause we’re always buying new stuff to throw away.
By our building there’s a pile
And it’s grown there quite a while
When the pile gets really vile, we cry “oy vey!”
So we always look for new things to put our trash in
‘Cause we’re always buying new stuff to throw away.
Neighbors we once thought were rubes
Scored with those new-fangled tubes
Those ecstatic rubes
Took pneumatic tubes - and made them pay!
‘Cause we always look for new things to put our trash in
‘Cause we’re always buying new stuff to throw away.
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much of the curbside litter is a "parting" gift from an automobile driver of whom we have way way too many.
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@Ace, also reminds me of the unusual Blues Traveler lyric in "Runaround" that what someone told you while leaving you is "Like a game show contestant with a parting gift, I could not believe my eyes" - around 0:35 in the song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ousaiByU1ko
These days, it seems the consolation gifts tend to be cash rather than something like a Swiffer or month of Klondike bars. (I bet that's just easier for the game show.)
@Ace, regarding "much of the curbside litter is a "parting" gift" - LOL - When a dog who doesn't live here visits someone here and leaves a little pyramid on the hall carpet (often near the elevator) that their human doesn't notice, we call that the guest dog leaving us a little "parting gift."
Check out the trash that piles up in lower Manhattan around William/Nassau/Ann/Fulton/John. The sidewalks are not passable on many days. Similar situation by the Gehry Building on Beekman Street.
The reasons: overdelopment - high rise luxury residential and hotel buildings are replacing old 5 story buildings; tourists; Pace University expansion; and numerous fast food places.
But ultimately and sadly, it is because folks don’t care.
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When I lived in Tokyo 20 years ago my recollection is that there were no garbage cans. Everyone was responsible for taking their trash with them.
In taking care of your own trash we would be painfully aware of just how much of it we are responsible for. And there would be no overflowing bins on the corners.
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Looking at the fascinating (and disgusting!) photos of NYC garbage yesterday, I noticed the only picture missing was the one with the caption: "Are you kidding me?"
I thought it must be particularly awful if wasn't being shown.
Now here it is today.
And it's awful.
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It struck me as odd that in a fairly long profile of Tiffany Cabán, which was full of the life experiences that supposedly made her qualified as Queens DA, the law school she attended was not mentioned. She went to New York Law School,* which is not a very good school. U.S. News and World Report ranked it 111 in its list of U.S. law schools.
Isn't the law school attended relevant in discussing the qualifications of a fairly young would-be head of a prosecutor's office? The college from which she graduated was included. It's hard to imagine that information being omitted in an article about anyone else.
*New York Law School is not to be confused with NYU Law School, which is a highly ranked school.
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@Lifelong Reader I'd keep in mind that NY Law School may have offered her a scholarship or another financial incentive to attend. Law school is expensive, which is even more challenging if you want to go into public defense work, which doesn't pay well.
Also, she had to pass the NY bar, which people from "highly ranked" schools do not. To assume that attending a lesser ranked law school makes her less qualified—versus allowing her work to speak for itself—is myopic.
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@Lifelong Reader
And what law school did Caban’s opponent attend? As I understand it, Katz, the newly declared Democratic Queens DA nominee, is actually not a lawyer.
@Diana: Really? People from "highly ranked" law schools don't have to pass the NY bar? That should be a major headline!
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Sabina O'Reilly.....yes, there are eight million stories in the naked city, and often in the Metro Diary. Real life can be more interesting, and more compelling, than a Sunday matinee.
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Re "the city has seen more trash in tourist areas."
In other cities there are fewer fast-food chains and candy stores, and therefore there's less trash to toss about -- fewer candy wrappers, styrofoam plates, paper cups, soda bottles.
But let there be no mistake: I do not live in a tourist area, and my neighbors and I are always picking up the garbage that people have let drop from their fingers. We have bodegas on every third corner, so there's plenty to buy, eat and drink while walking, and fling away.
Last year, I found a VCR tossed over the fence and onto one of my hostas.
The city is certainly cleaner, yes, when you compare it to the way it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the city didn't have enough money to deal with sanitation. But was that okay?
(Sigh. Someone will respond that in those days the city was "authentic." And I will reply that, having been born in Brooklyn in the mid 1950s, I remember an even more authentically clean, quiet Brooklyn in which inhabitants respected one another, and themselves, enough not to toss their trash willy-nilly everywhere.)
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@B.
Yup, similar. Born the late 40's, grew up in Brooklyn in the 50's. Looking back I don't think I'd consider it to have been clean--but it was not cluttered with garbage. The last thing that immigrants or the sons/daughters of immigrants wanted to do was to live in a garbage strewn neighborhood. We kids could always play stickball or stoop ball without sidestepping refuge. Garbage was in those silver metal cans, with the tops on. The same cans that people would then put into the street by the curb to "save" their parking spot.
There probably was less garbage to throw out. People did not have all the packaging, and soda bottles were returned for the deposit money. Less affluent, simpler times.
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Well, true Billy. Those days were practically pre-plastic. But our parents would never countenance our throwing ice cream wrappers onto the sidewalk. Or bottles? Good God.
I remember distinctly the day, sometime in the early 1970s, I saw that the big boulder off Prospect Park Southwest that my cousins and I used to clamber on as children, was girt about with broken glass. Seeing it that way was a shock. (By then, it looked less big too.)
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