You won’t see piles of garbage on the street when you watch an episode of Seinfeld or a Woody Allen film, but when space is precious compromises must be made. This is by no means the fault of modern-day New Yorkers. By American standards, New York is an old city originally laid-out by planners who could never in their wildest dreams have imagined a metropolis of 8 million people. Building the city with a secondary web of service alleys never occurred to them, or was deemed impractical. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, Fredrick Law Olmstead was able to transform a 140 square-block swamp at what was then the northern end of Manhattan into the wonder that is Central Park, but by that point New York was developed too far for a retrofit.
If you’ve never been to New York, it is impossible to prepare yourself for the sight of garbage lining virtually every street in the city. Each night an armada of trucks set out to collect the refuse, but over the course of the day, truly heroic piles of seeping waste can accumulate on the curb. This takes some getting used to, particularly the first time you step around one of these temporary hills to enter that chic restaurant you read about in Zagat.
Yet, as the world “goes green”, New York might be a perfect example of what we truly face as a society. In Chicago, we have the luxury of filling our dumpsters and keeping our trash largely out of sight. In New York, every day is a visual lesson on how much we consume and discard. 5¢ refunds on glass bottles aside, recycling can only take us so far. As landfills reach capacity and new projects face opposition at every front (“not in my backyard”), how do we cut down on the amount of garbage we produce in our everyday lives?
If you’ve never been to New York, it is impossible to prepare yourself for the sight of garbage lining virtually every street in the city. Each night an armada of trucks set out to collect the refuse, but over the course of the day, truly heroic piles of seeping waste can accumulate on the curb. This takes some getting used to, particularly the first time you step around one of these temporary hills to enter that chic restaurant you read about in Zagat.
Yet, as the world “goes green”, New York might be a perfect example of what we truly face as a society. In Chicago, we have the luxury of filling our dumpsters and keeping our trash largely out of sight. In New York, every day is a visual lesson on how much we consume and discard. 5¢ refunds on glass bottles aside, recycling can only take us so far. As landfills reach capacity and new projects face opposition at every front (“not in my backyard”), how do we cut down on the amount of garbage we produce in our everyday lives?
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