A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash | Hacker News Reader

A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash

collectorsweekly.com

94 pointsdanso30 comments

For those who haven't traveled to the big apple recently: the trash is still piled waist or chest-high on the street, albeit in trash bags. Every time I go back it seems to be trash day, but maybe that's a coincidence. Either way, DC smells like cherry blossoms and NYC smells like hot garbage.

NYC's street grid was made with no space for alleys. As a result, the vast majority of the city has no place to put their trash out for pickup except on the sidewalk. The commercial areas are a bit better because the high-rises have trash storage and direct pickup.

Trash pickup days are two-three times per week, but are staggered by address (blocks or something bigger). So there is always some garbage somewhere except the weekends.

As an aside, DC smells like armpits and cherry blossoms.

If the street is the semi-permanent resting place for trash between pickups, they should build some kind of storage container... some kind of a large box that trash goes into with a lid that contains it until it's picked up. It could help contain the garbage so it doesn't leak all over the street and smell up the place, and keep it more compact. But i'm probably over-engineering again!

Garbage isn't (supposed to be) stored on the street between pickups, you're only supposed to put them out on garbage day.

The main issue is that garbage sits out in the sun for a few hours waiting for the truck to swing by, and gets, er, rather ripe in the meantime.

Many buildings do wheel their garbage out in standardized things that look rather like mine carts. Some do not, I wish there was more regulation in this regard - so at least garbage juice doesn't leak all over the sidewalk.

Note that this is really a Midtown Manhattan problem. In the residential neighborhoods the garbage situation is (relatively) under control - doesn't smell like roses, but you don't have garbage juice flowing like rivers down the sidewalk. A lot of the older Midtown buildings are too old to have internal garbage management, and are densely packed enough to produce a lot of garbage.

Midtown Manhattan is, IMO, one of the worst places a smell-sensitive person can find themselves. Ever.

The real reason Manhattan's garbage smells so bad is because they have no system for composting, which would remove the vast majority of rotting plant and animal parts from the standard waste stream. NYC is far behind other major cities in this regard, though they've been piloting the project in some of the outer boroughs recently.

Most NY apartments also don't have garbage disposals in their kitchen sinks, because they were banned until about a decade ago. Apartments that haven't been built or renovated since then generally won't have one. This further boosts the amount of food waste going into garbage cans.

Parts of Chinatown are pretty bad, too. Sometimes it's pointless to even try to walk down the sidewalk on Eldridge, you just have to walk in the street.

That's actually how it's done [1] in the Netherlands in general.

What you'd really want is how they do it in Amsterdam [2] though, with underground storage boxes (check out the videos.)

So all in all you weren't even close to over-engineering yet ;)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgAAHz-RVWU [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW6bahKyrrM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRpvHQGLysY

Better yet. Buildings that alert the maint. staff that the refuse truck is nearby, and refuse trucks that alert buildings as to their location. Trash doesn't have to block the street all day/morning/night.

Is trash collected in the daytime? That seems like as bad an idea as doing roadwork in the daytime.

I don't know exactly, but I've personally never seen a garbage truck in the daytime, and have seen plenty in the middle of the night.

This would probably throw a wrench in the "bring garbage out only as the truck approaches" idea, I doubt it'd be economical to keep a sizable building staff around for 2am in the morning.

In Uruguay we have a system bought from Italy, also in use in Argentina:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trash_container_Rosar...

they're picked up at night.

The problem is that with the density of population and the amount of garbage produced, the boxes would heavily obstruct the sidewalk in some neighborhoods. They'd be the size of small carting dumpsters (which some of the newer buildings use - the sanitation trucks have forklifts to handle those.)

This is a good explanation. At the Upper East Side you have this beautiful buildings with carpets on the sidewalk and a porter and right next to him a pile of black trash bags. A very contrasting picture.

For one thing, every day is trash day. Each street might only be weekly, but chances are at least one street you're walking down will be collected each day.

For another, there are a lot of people in NYC. Manhattan's population density is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 per square mile -- over 7 times as dense as DC, and 10 times as dense as Baltimore. More people, more trash. Barring some massive trash-centric infrastructure (I personally favor the Disney-style tunnel system), the trash bags are going to rise proportional to the buildings around them.

Walk the streets in New Orleans in the morning sometime. New York will seem like a cleanroom.

To be fair, trash removal happens at a surprisingly efficient and varied pace. For example, I typically try to fill the trash cans outside of my apartment but when they're full, I'll just drop a bag - or a stack of cardboard boxes, or a grocery bag full of trash if I've run out of normal bags - and can expect that it'll be picked up all just the same.

Here's a photo I took while I worked in the Financial District (http://www.flickr.com/photos/32451477@N02/8025537821/)...not sure why trash seemed to really pile up there...

Trash? With those clear bags and all that cardboard, looks like recycling to me.

Off Topic: Having just browsed over this website I have to say it has a great layout for depth-heavy articles. Better than any news site that I can think of. Great images, uncluttered, and a wide variety of topics. Very nice!

I don't know why I feel inclined to preemptively defend this submission from the "How does this relate to hackerism?" comments...but if you've ever had to maintain an ongoing software service, I think you'll find plenty of insights in an article about the hidden costs and infrastructure of garbage management (and the politics/schemeing it takes to build it) :)

This to me looks like an in-depth look at something most of us don't consider from day to day, making it more of the 'intellectually stimulating' sort of article rather than "OMG, the TSA did something outrageous!!!".

I also found another relation to "hacker""ism" in the story of how George Warring put his sanitation workers in white (to associate them with hygiene) and helmets (to give them authority). Think of it as User Experience design for the city dwellers in the late 19th century.

There's a flip side to this story. While it's true that rates of certain acute diseases have gone down since NYC has gotten cleaner, rates of chronic diseases such as asthma have gone up. There's a school of thought that thinks our modern city existence is too clean, and we're no longer exposed to "old friends" that keep asthma and other chronic illnesses at bay. Check out the book "An Epidemic of Absence" for more details: http://amzn.to/12Blhij. In ten years from now, we may be taking pills for "beneficial parasites" as we do now for beneficial bacteria.

There's some debate about this: asthma rates in cities tend to be worse in poorer neighborhoods where there's greater exposure to pollution and toxins. Some studies have also suggested there are particular allergens in inner-city neighborhoods that trigger it, from vermin, etc.

Also: it's not clear that there's more asthma, or we're just diagnosing it more often, especially in poorer neighborhoods where folks might not have had much health care a hundred years ago.

Instead of pills, what about little wet-wipe like rags bearing germs in packaging labeled with the age at which one should have one's child play with the rag (or wipe it on their favorite toy) in order to safely, effectively expose them and work-out/teach their immune system.

Daycare. These hotbeds of disease are to be avoided by adults however. I'm fit and healthy are rarely get sick. This year, thanks to my daughters daycare, I have had chickenpox (god awful, getting it as a child doesn't prevent an adult dose I now know), some kind of deathly vomit bug (first time I've had such a thing), about three colds, and sinusitis. The little girl has a minor sickness and I nearly die.

Even better. Doesn't necessarily have to be in pill form. Alternatively you can have your kids visit a farm every weekend, although that might be leaving too much to chance.

Awesome!! On a realted note everyone should read / hear to the book "Ragged Dick" from early 19 hundreds (1920 I suppose) about a story (fiction)of a orphan boy who lived in the streets of NYC , used to polish shoes and who grew up to be the one of the most richest and prominent individuals.

Very inspirational stuff and remind about the early not so charming history of NY http://librivox.org/ragged-dick-by-horatio-alger-jr/

"For street cleaning, he first reached out to Teddy Roosevelt, who basically said, ‘What, are you nuts? Nobody should do that. That’s an impossible job. I’m not going to do that.’ So Roosevelt took over the police department, which was also in dire need of reform."

Back in college, a history-buff friend told me this story, but I thought she was telling me a joke. Who'da thunk it?

If you want a good trash collection system in NYC, move to Roosevelt Island. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/...

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