New York: Everything including the kitchen sink!
Sep 16, 2009
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Those of us who lived a relatively sheltered suburban childhood in areas such as my old stomping grounds, Silicon Valley, are often first intimidated by big cities. As a kid, San Francisco always seemed so daunting--admittedly, I almost always took BART, CalTrain, or the ferries to the city by the bay because driving just raised the hairs on my neck. I visited New York for the first time when I was 19, and San Francisco became so innocent: driving around Manhattan was terrifying! Fast forward to the neon signs of Seoul and Tokyo, which I first visited in my 20s, and San Francisco and New York were just mere villages.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, suburbanites disparaged cities as dirty and dangerous--and while there was an element of truth in such comments, for the most part, our cities worked and hummed along. Now, I feel cities are amongst the greenest lifestyles around--I'm sure Manhattan was a lovely green oasis in the seventeenth century, but it's better that 2,000,000 residents are concentrated there than spread across McMansions through more of upstate New York and Long Island.
One minor issue I have with New York and other east coast cities is the method of garbage collection. When I was a graduate student in Baltimore, I was shocked on my first garbage collection day when my housemates told me to just toss the garbage bag on the sidewalk the night before. Gross! Overall garbage pick-up days appeared to be fairly seamless, but there was still too much trash on the streets for my liking. Years later, I visited New York often on business, and when wandering the streets of midtown Manhattan at night, I cringed at the huge heaps of trash. Often they resembled beings with lives of their own, but that was because I saw a huge rat moving amongst the midst of bags and cardboard boxes. It was then that garbage cans gained some new appreciation from me. Some of my high school classmates felt our hometown, Cupertino, was too "sterile," but the streets were clean and you rarely saw plastic bags or papers flying around.New York appears to do what it can to enable recycling, a huge task in a city of over 8,000,000 people. We recently visited New York for a wedding, and in the days before and after the event, we spent much time wandering around Manhattan's wonderful neighborhoods. I could not help, however, but notice the heaps of garbage on the curbs and just wondered where the heck it all ended up. Curious, I looked up NYC's recycling program, and the tips published on the City's government web site appeared to work overall. I think their site could use more clarity: when skimming through it, you'd think it was okay to throw batteries and CFL's in the trash, so perhaps . . . a larger font . . . would get the message out when explaining how to get rid of those small, pesky, and TOXIC materials that we really don't want in a landfill.
Last Friday afternoon, we were wandering through NOLITA when we saw these compressed stacks of metal--note the frying pan wedged in there between old appliances. We're not sure if building supervisors or city sanitation workers compressed these materials together, but nonetheless, they made for a fun photo op! And I'm glad that all that metal is (hopefully) not ending up in a landfill on Staten Island.