#garbage faeries

By Robin Nagle, WSJ, March 29, 2013 Ray's route, in a sanitation district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was a plum assignment--a reward for his seniority. It had a reputation for clean garbage. The bags rarely broke, and maggots were less common, even in the summer heat.

As the anthropologist in residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation, I was tagging along with Ray and his partner Sal (both names are pseudonyms) on a sparkling autumn morning. The quiet streets had been our domain when we started at 6, but by 7:30, more and more people with pressed clothes and closed faces were emerging from doorways and descending stoops. Ray and Sal didn't pay them much attention. They paid us even less.

We were making our way down a street lined with tall sycamore trees and elegant townhouses when, all at once, a muse appeared. She was tall, slender, in her mid-20s, with flawless olive skin. Ray leaned against the truck and gazed at her. He smiled hugely, completely unconcerned that his blatant stare would draw anyone's disapproval. Years on the job had taught him that when he put on his uniform every morning, he became invisible--like every other "garbageman."

The city's Department of Sanitation is surprisingly small. More than eight million residents are served by fewer than 10,000 Sanitation personnel, who pick up the garbage and figure out where to put it. With an annual budget of $1.35 billion, the department makes sure that more than 6,000 miles of streets are swept several times a week and that the city's 11,000 tons of household trash and 2,000 tons of household recycling are collected every day.

It wasn't always this way. New York's first street-cleaning law, enacted in 1657, forbid households from throwing "any rubbish, filth, oyster shells, dead animal or anything like it" into the streets or canals. Nonetheless, for most of its history, much of New York City was infamously filthy. Residents endured streets that were shin-deep in all manner of debris (ashes, offal, sewage) and died in extravagant numbers from diseases that even back then were largely preventable.

It wasn't until the late 19th century--when the inept Department of Street Cleaning was reorganized along military lines--that things began to come under control. In 1929, the DSC became today's Department of Sanitation, and the quasi-military structure carried forward. Outsiders may scoff, but sanitation workers form a standing army designed to fight an endless war against an enemy so relentless that victory is impossible. Stalemate counts as success, which may be why few Gothamites think twice about the military maneuvers that unfold in their streets every day.

The official color of the sanitation worker's uniform is "spruce," and in my duties with the department, I discovered that the outfit acts as a cloaking device. Working on postparade cleanups in warm weather, I quickly learned that it was useless to ask lingering bystanders to move back a little from the barricades. The coarse bristles of my hand broom were going to scrape their sandaled feet, but even when I stood directly in front of them saying "Excuse me" over and over, they didn't see or hear me. It isn't that they were ignoring me: I was never part of their awareness in the first place.

Invisibility can have its pluses, of course. For one: mongo. As a noun, mongo is sanitation slang for treasure salvaged from trash. As a verb, "to mongo" is to look for and rescue such wealth. The public never notices when a sanitation worker slips something into the mongo bin (a box attached to the side of the truck, meant to hold tools but more often used for such stash).

Locker rooms and lunchrooms in Department of Sanitation garages are elaborately decorated with found lamps, couches, desks, chairs, sports memorabilia and one-of-a-kind junk, like a foot-tall skiing Santa that sings "Jingle Bells" and gyrates like Elvis.

On his posh Upper West Side route, Ray has come across many treasures. Once he found a three-piece suit wadded in a litter basket on a corner near a dry cleaner's shop. While Sal waited, Ray took the suit inside, tried it on and had it measured for alterations. He picked it up when he worked that route again two days later.

A few New Yorkers do see through the sanitation workers' cloak of invisibility. Building superintendents and porters often help throw bags into the back of the truck. Small children sometimes stop to talk to the crew and watch them work, especially if the hopper blade is making a lot of grinding and crunching noises while it pulverizes something big, like a stove or a couch. Old people often watch closely, too; sometimes they offer thanks.

Motorists also notice sanitation workers, but usually only after they have turned onto a narrow street, come halfway up the block and find their car stuck behind a slow-moving truck that was plainly visible when they made the turn. (Woe unto the motorist who then protests by yelling and cursing: The more they squawk, the slower the crew will move. Indeed, some workers add an extra cycle of the hopper for every honk of a horn. Who's invisible now?)

The career of sanitation workers is, by definition, focused on objects and debris that others have decided merit no further attention. But they are key players in maintaining the basic rhythms of a market economy. If consumed goods can't be discarded, the space they occupy remains full, and new goods can't become part of a household.

Most New Yorkers, to say nothing of city dwellers elsewhere in the country, don't give much thought to this daily ebb and flow. They put out their garbage each night, and imagine--as old-timers in the Sanitation Department like to quip--that legions of Garbage Faeries make it all go away.

In the wake of a blizzard that had left garbage piled shoulder-high (and many months after the encounter with the olive-skinned girl), Ray's partner Sal was emptying public litter baskets--a hated duty among sanitation workers--when he came across a particularly dilapidated can, barely upright. It was the old kind, made of orange metal webbing, and Sal tossed it into the back of the truck.

"You just threw out a perfectly good public garbage can…I saw you do it," an elderly woman yelled.

"Oh no, ma'am," Sal said, not hesitating. "It went into the truck to be serviced. In a few minutes it'll come out the front, polished up and good as new."

The woman's eyebrows rose nearly to her starched blue hairline as Sal jumped on the back step of the truck, waved goodbye and motioned his partner to drive on, quick. Just another Garbage Faerie, performing a bit of magic on the streets of Gotham.