Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (4 page)

The putrescibles were barged to the reduction plants and the ash delivered to landfills. (Brooklyn’s was carted to Fishhooks McCarthy’s smoldering Corona ash dump, in Queens, which became the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, “a fantastic farm, where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” The ash dump closed in 1933; six years later, the World’s Fair rose on its site.) As it had been for many years, dry garbage, after being picked clean of valuable materials like rags and paper, was used to fill waterways and wetlands, creating tens of thousands of acres of valuable waterfront real estate, including most of lower Manhattan, the Red Hook shoreline of Brooklyn, and almost the entire northern and southern fringes of both Kings and Queens Counties, upon which our airports were built.

New Yorkers in 1895 were just as balky about separating garbage as New Yorkers are today, and Colonel Waring’s diversion rate (that is, the amount of stuff he kept out of landfills) was not high. In 1898, Tammany Hall recaptured the mayor’s office, ended the recycling program, and resumed ocean dumping. The garbage killed oyster beds and it interfered with shipping. When waterfront-property owners complained about animal carcasses and rags on their beaches, the city once again dialed back ocean dumping (though it wasn’t banned by the federal government until 1934), and a single stream of unsorted garbage flowed to eighty-nine open dumps scattered around the boroughs.

By the forties, public tolerance for the accumulating filth and vermin reached a tipping point. The city responded by closing its festering mounds and opening incinerators. At one point, twenty-two so-called burn units (in addition to the scores of small-scale “toasters” stoked by superintendents in high-rise apartment buildings) operated throughout the city, spewing noxious black smoke into the skies. The haze was so thick at times that Manhattan couldn’t be seen from New Jersey.

As the small dumps were phased out and incinerators fell into disfavor, the city pioneered other methods of entombing waste. In the newfangled “sanitary” landfills, garbage was covered with a blanket of dirt at the end of each working day. The dirt muffled odors and kept vermin at bay (that is, if it was applied soon enough. In Santa Marta, Columbia, buzzards gorging on unburied trash have become too fat to fly, prompting rescue efforts by environmentalists). New York’s first modern dump was Robert Moses’s Fresh Kills, which opened for business in 1948. Staten Island residents weren’t happy about the abrasive master builder’s plan, but Moses had promised them that the landfill would close in three years and that they’d get a new highway in return for their indulgence. Moses died in 1981, twenty years before the last Fresh Kills-bound garbage barge was tugged out of New York Harbor.

The more I learned about the history of garbage in New York, the more I saw that it was a history of interim solutions, of reactions to crises political, economic, and social. Even when the federal government stepped in, change was achingly slow. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, for example, but it took until 1994 for New York City to shut the damper on its last municipal incinerators. For more than two hundred years, New York’s garbage has changed hands through cronyism and favors, and landed on the backs of the disenfranchised. Only recently have NIMBY-ism and advocates for environmental justice begun to push back. Sometimes garbage is shunted elsewhere, but always at great cost.

It’s the same anyplace, really. Whether you live in rural West Virginia or inner-city Chicago, you don’t want other people’s garbage anywhere near your backyard. Yet Americans everywhere are producing steadily more waste. Politicians devise short-term solutions, and waste managers, who own the means of disposal, seem to hold all the cards.

By the time I began traveling with my trash, Fresh Kills had been closed for two years. I knew that the city’s garbage was now trucked far and wide, but I didn’t know exactly where my stuff went or what happened to it once it arrived. Early one morning, I watched from my third-floor vantage point as a packer truck compacted my peanut butter jars and chicken bones with those of my many, many neighbors. What had been mine was now, unceremoniously, the city’s. It was time to come downstairs, to find out what happened next.

Part One

To the Dump

Chapter One

Dark Angels of Detritus

O
n a cool October morning, I caught up with John Sullivan and Billy Murphy in the middle of their Park Slope garbage route. I watched them carefully, from a slight distance, but still it took me several long minutes to figure out, in the most rudimentary way, what my san men were doing. They moved quickly, in a blur of trash can dragging, lid tossing, handle cranking, and heaving. Though barrel-chested and muscle-bound, they moved with balletic precision. Sometimes Murphy and Sullivan appeared to be working independently, other times they collaborated. Save for the grunts and squeals of the truck, it all happened in relative silence. While Murphy drove to a gap between parked cars, Sullivan slid barrels up the sidewalk to the waiting truck. Sometimes Murphy jumped down to load, sometimes Sullivan did it on his own. Then they switched. The truck moved in jerks, halting with a screech of brakes. Although most sanitation workers stopped for coffee at eight, Sullivan and Murphy kept loading. Upon their return to the garage at ten-thirty, no one voiced the usual san man’s query: “Did you get it up?” Sullivan and Murphy—twenty-year veterans of the Department of Sanitation, each approaching the age of fifty—had, as they always did.

I’d met the team at 6:00 a.m. roll call at the local DSNY (for Department of Sanitation, New York) garage, a low brick structure on the farthest fringe of the neighborhood. It was still dark when I locked up my bike and walked hesitantly into a large, dimly lit room filled with garbage trucks: eleven for household refuse and nine for recycling. I made my way down a cinder-block corridor lined with smoking san men and into the fluorescent-lit office. Like many a high school principal’s redoubt, it had a window overlooking a hallway filled with loiterers and humming with paranoia. There were even lockers and a lunchroom down the way.

Waiting for Jerry Terlizzi, the district supervisor, to appear, I took a look around. Every stick of furniture—desks, cabinets, footlockers—appeared to have been plucked from the street and coated with the same brown paint. The walls were crammed with yellowed memoranda and notices but held not a scrap of decoration. A dark roan dog and a dull black cat padded around the building, former strays, but even their names seemed impermanent.

“The dog, the dog. Oh yeah, that’s Lupo,” said an officer uncertainly when I inquired. And the cat?

“Her name is Meow,” answered a clerk.

“No, it’s Mami,” corrected another.

While I waited for Terlizzi to get off the phone and call roll, I listened to the men.

“It’s gonna rain the next three days.”

“Oh, man, that garbage is gonna be heavy. You’re gonna lose five pounds on Friday alone.”

“I hate rain. That’s a drag.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a garbageman.”

Behind me, someone said in a mincing tone, “Can I fill out a job application?” That was for my benefit, so I chuckled along with everyone else. Then two men came in from the street, jostling and punching each other’s shoulders. One said, “Somebody just stole the wheels off a bike out there!” I sprang for the door, and the guys laughed.

“Just kidding, but I wouldn’t leave it there. Some bum from the park is gonna steal it. Bring it in here.” He said it “he-yeh.” I went out to get my bicycle and when I got back briefly pretended someone had stolen the seat, prompting instant outrage, though it was actually in my backpack.

I looked at the worker cards stuck into a bar on the Plexiglas window. The rectangles of cardboard were soft with handling, inscribed mostly with Italian and Irish names, and coupled with trucks identified with an alphanumeric. As senior men, Sullivan and Murphy had exclusive day use of truck CN191 (another team would use it at night). The junior men took whatever they were handed. By now, about thirty men were standing around smoking and chatting in their dark green DSNY sweatshirts. The garage had one female sanitation worker, but she wasn’t in today. When I’d meet her later, she’d invite me to use her private bathroom, which was decorated with cute animal posters.

New to this scene, I was struck by the way the men spoke to one another. They were loud and harsh, in one another’s faces. They seemed quick to anger. Maybe there was too much testosterone in a small place. Or maybe just too many men who didn’t like to have a boss breathing down their neck, a factor that had lured some of them to the job. Inside, the complaints never ceased. So-and-so was an idiot. The night crew never did its job right. The boss could go to hell. I’d be crushed by such contempt, but no one here seemed to mind.

Terlizzi was parked behind a small desk. He was tall and thin, with wavy silver hair, high cheekbones, and a bemused manner. “I’m missing a truck,” he told a clerk, irritated. Its collection ticket, which would state how much weight the truck had tipped at the transfer station, hadn’t shown up in his paper or electronic records. The clerk opened a program on the ancient computer and scrolled down. “I checked that already,” Terlizzi barked. The clerk sighed, and Terlizzi stepped out to call roll.

Two to a truck, the men roared into the twilit streets, and soon the office fell quiet. After asking me to sign a waiver, Terlizzi handed me over to John Burrafato, who worked on Motorized Litter Patrol. A pugnacious man with a small black mustache and a military bearing, Burrafato cruised the district in a department sedan, making lists of bulk items—pallets discarded in an industrial area, a blown tire in the middle of the road—to be collected by truck. He noted problem areas and wrote $25 summonses to residents who didn’t follow the recycling rules and $1,500 summonses (going up to $20,000) for wholesale illegal dumping. Because DSNY spent relatively little on public education, only a minority of city residents seemed to understand all the garbage rules. Being pugnacious, then, was a prerequisite for this job.

Burrafato was supposed to bring me up to my neighborhood, where Sullivan and Murphy were already at work. But he wasn’t ready to do this quite yet. First, there was paperwork for him to clear, then a mechanic to insult. I sat on a brown footlocker and read the
Daily News
while he flitted in and out of the office. Terlizzi had found his missing truck, but the air was still poisoned with his ill humor. Someone on the telephone was pressuring Terlizzi to sign off on some forms. He said, “I
didn’t
say when I’ll do it, but if you need it right now, I’ll come
back
there and
do
it!” He leaped to his feet and slammed down the phone. “Fuck
you!
” he shouted at the supplicant, who could easily have been me. Just yesterday, I had been pestering him on the phone about getting the waiver. “You make that coffee yet?” he growled at Burrafato now.

“No, I’m getting these guys straightened out.” Burrafato went out, came in, went out.

“Okay, the coffee’s done. You want a cup?” Burrafato was talking to me.

“No, thanks,” I said, wanting only to get out of there. Burrafato went into a small room and poured himself coffee. By now I was reading the sports section. Then I read the ancient memos on the walls and studied the maps, trying to figure out my district, garage, section, and route. New York’s roughly 320 square miles are broken into fifty-nine sanitation districts, where about 7,600 workers clean the streets twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. (In comparison, Los Angeles has about 580 workers tidying up 450 square miles, but its population is less than half of New York’s eight million, and its trucks host just one worker instead of two. Chicago, with a population of 2.9 million spreading over 228 square miles, relies on 3,300 sanitation workers.) Brooklyn’s districts are divided into zones North and South. Here in South, there are eleven other garages besides my own, which is called the Six. The territory covered by the Six is in turn broken into five sections: my street is part of Section 65, which is divided into three routes cleaned by three different trucks. When I was satisfied with my triangulations, I poked my head into the side room to ask Burrafato a question. He was watching TV and sipping a second cup of coffee.

I retreated to my footlocker. Terlizzi was now on the phone with “the borough,” his bosses at the Brooklyn headquarters, ordering up an FEL, or front-end loader. “Someone just dumped the contents of the first floor of his house onto the street,” he said to me. “Happens all the time.” As soon as he got off, the phone rang. It was the cat lady on Fifth Street, complaining yet again that the san men hadn’t collected her garbage. A clerk named Scooter handled the call, which meant he held the receiver at arm’s length so the entire room could hear the woman’s litany of grief. When it was over, he told her soberly, “I’ll make sure this information gets to the right people.” He hung up, and the assembled burst out laughing. Everyone knew about the cat lady; she owned twenty animals. “It’s not against the law to dump your litter box onto your garbage, but it’s common courtesy to put it in a bag,” Scooter explained.

At last, Burrafato unlocked his sedan and drove me uphill. By now, Murphy and Sullivan were halfway through their route and lightly sweating. The men seemed dour and angry to me, and I was afraid to ask them questions. On foot, I watched and I followed. Soon I realized they seemed sour only because they were concentrating. In constant motion, lifting heavy barrels, they could get hurt if they didn’t pay attention. Metal cans banged against their legs; trailer hitches poked from high SUV bumpers. Drivers honked, urging the men to hustle it up, to get their truck out of the way. Double-parked delivery vans blocked their progress. There was also a surprising amount of dog shit near the garbage cans, and many plastic bags were shiny with urine. Had I never noticed this before?

After a few minutes, I began dragging together barrels from neighboring houses to form a group, but the guys didn’t want me lifting anything into the truck. “You’re gonna be sore tomorrow,” Murphy said. He was rounder than Sullivan, and he had a stiff, loping walk, not quite a run. He kept his head mulishly down, his eyes trained on the ground. His palms were thick-skinned and yellow, with deep crevices near the nails. Around the garage, he was known as Daddy. Sullivan had an angular face softened by a narrow strip of beard. His hair was a wiry brown and gray, cut into a mullet. A black belt in karate, he was more agile than Murphy. I found him soft-spoken but intense.