Picking Up NYC
a digital companion page to our Photoville 2020 exhibit
curated by andi potamkin and maggie lee
As the DSNY workforce rises up to meet its latest challenge of picking up NYC during the Coronavirus pandemic, our exhibit invites viewers to remember the countless challenges they’ve faced before with unwavering strength, including 9/11, Hurricane Maria cleanup, and the public health crisis of the 19th century.
Quotes throughout this exhibit are excerpts from Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle.
1.Three sanitation workers, circa 1930s. Courtesy of DSNY.
“The workforce of Sanitation is surprisingly small. New York’s 8.2 million residents are served by fewer than 10,000 sanitation employees.”
2. DSNY Volunteers in Puerto Rico. Photo by Andrea Booher for FEMA, October 2017.
After Hurricane Maria, DSNY deployed a team of 31 volunteers to Puerto Rico to assist with the recovery effort. The team canvassed the island, providing technical assistance on debris removal to the mayors of each municipality and, on the way, distributing food and water. The Puerto Rican people fondly nicknamed them the “Yellow Shirts” for their high-visibility uniforms. It became known that wherever the Yellow Shirts went, supplies were soon to follow.
3. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, August 2019.
"The job of collecting Gotham's municipal waste falls to the small army of men and women who make sure the city stays alive by wrestling with the challenge of garbage every day, fully aware that their efforts will receive scant notice and even less praise. This army makes up New York’s Department of Sanitation, the largely unknown, often unloved, and absolutely essential organization charged with creating and maintaining a system of flows so fundamental to the city’s well-being that its work is a form of breathing...”
4. Tameka Robinson hugs a colleague at the memorial for her fiance Raymond Copeland, the first sanitation worker to die of COVID-19. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, April 2020.
5. Concept art for a department poster from the former DSNY Drafting Unit, circa 1980s. Wheels on this type of truck made foot injuries especially common; later models allow for workers to exit the cab in front of the tires. Courtesy of DSNY.
“Sanitation workers don’t take out the trash. You and I take out the trash. Sanitation workers take care of what happens next, and that’s when the danger gets real. Collecting refuse has long been known to be dirty, strenuous work. Less well known is that it is among the most deadly occupations.”
6. Sanitation worker on a basket route, circa 1980s. Courtesy of DSNY.
“Few sanitation workers forget their first few days hoisting trash. The soreness of the early months seems to find muscles that most of us never knew we had. It comes to pass that each of us develops our own version of the proper technique for moving heavy weight.”
7. Retired Sanitation Worker Nelson Molina (in gray), creator of the “Treasures in the Trash” collection, with a colleague at the Manhattan East 11 garage. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, August 2019.
8. Concept art for an internal report from the former DSNY Drafting Unit, circa 1980s. Courtesy of DSNY.
“A common misunderstanding about snow is that one storm is much like the next, but each is its own contest. Some storms are especially icy. Some carry more wet precipitation. After a stretch of extremely cold weather, snow fighting requires different methods than if the preceding days were warm. Sanitation pride wraps around many things, but snow fighting is one of the biggest.”
9. Side view of the Mack LR, the collection truck used today. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, 2020.
10. Side view of an IH ‘escalator’ truck, commonly used in the 1950’s and 60’s. For this 1966 photo, the truck was repainted to feature the agency’s new Helvetica-based logo and black and white color scheme, designed by Walter Kacik. Courtesy of DSNY.
11. The Department of Street Cleaning on parade, circa 1900. Courtesy of DSNY.
“The requirement that workers wear uniforms, on the books since back in 1881, had never been taken seriously. In 1895, [Colonel] Waring insisted the men adhere to it, but in a most curious way. With a showman’s zeal for publicity, he had his troops sweeping streets, emptying ash barrels, and carting rubbish while dressed in white trousers and jackets, and tall white helmets. He wanted the public to associate the DSC workforce with hygiene and cleanliness...
New Yorkers witnessed men in white uniforms actually sweeping the streets- all the streets, not just those of the wealthy- several times in a single day. They saw ash barrels emptied with on-the-clock regularity. Crisp curb lines and elegantly laid paving stones revealed themselves for the first time in decades...To celebrate, Waring organized a parade. On a sun-filled afternoon in May 1896, the entire Department of Street Cleaning workforce marched down Fifth Avenue in startlingly white uniforms.”
12. A flag bearer from the DSNY Ceremonial Unit at the memorial for Raymond Copeland, the first sanitation worker to die of COVID-19. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, April 2020.
13. Department of Sanitation uniforms, mid-20th century. Courtesy of DSNY.
“Systemic garbage collection was instituted in New York less than 120 years ago, but since then the public has come to rely on the service as commonplace and unexceptional.”
14. Officers and sanitation workers on parade, 1954. Courtesy of DSNY.
15-16. DSNY marches in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, circa 1990s. Courtesy of DSNY.
17. DSNY marches in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, circa 1990s. Courtesy of DSNY.
18. Street cleaners in formation at the turn of the 20th century. Courtesy of DSNY.
“The town’s first street-cleaning law was enacted in 1657, when householders were forbidden to throw ‘any rubbish, filth, oyster shells, dead animal or anything like it’ into the streets or into the canals…
By the close of the seventeenth century, nearly 5,000 people were squeezed into the bottom of Manhattan. Ever greater quantities and ever more unusual categories of urban refuse- human and animal, solid and liquid, poisonous and innocuous- seemed always beyond capacity. By this time, public health and the cleanliness of New York’s streets were inextricably linked.”
19-20. In the wake of 9/11, DSNY was responsible for cleaning and hauling away a staggering 1.6 million tons of debris. Over the next 10 months, they worked to exhaustively screen the material- down to a ¼” sieve- to remove any remains, personal effects, and evidence. Photos from September / October 2001, Courtesy of DSNY.
21-23. After Hurricane Maria, a team of DSNY volunteers canvassed the island of Puerto Rico, providing technical assistance on debris removal. In these photos, they assess road and bridge damage in Jayuya. Photos by Andrea Booher for FEMA, October 2017.
24-25. DSNY fully mobilized the morning after Hurricane Sandy, working around the clock for a month to clear away over 420,000 tons of storm debris. Photos by Michael Anton for DSNY, November 2012.
“If sanitation workers aren’t there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”
26. Supervisors and superintendents salute at the funeral of Steven Frosch, a sanitation worker who was killed in the line of duty. Sanitation work is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous occupations by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with a fatality rate several times higher than police work and firefighting. Photo by Michael Anton for DSNY, June 2014.
27. A sanitation worker ‘picking up’ his route in Brooklyn. The labor is intense: a day’s work could involve lifting as much as 20 tons of material. Photo by Charlie Eisenbach, May 2020.
“The single hardest part of the job is not the trash- its weight, its smell, its relentlessness, its perils. The hardest part is not working in miserable weather, or rarely getting two days off in a row, or bouncing around the clock (sometimes for years), or driving relays forever, or working nights, or being sneered at by the public you serve. The hardest part of the job isn’t even the occasionally senseless fulminations of departmental bureaucracy, which can make you nuts. The hardest part of the job is much more straightforward. The hardest part of the job is waking up. Maybe it’s because the day starts so early and demands such brute labor. Maybe it’s because the human animal isn’t meant to get up every morning in the middle of the night.”
28. Concept art for an internal report from the former DSNY Drafting Unit, circa 1980s. Courtesy of DSNY.
29. Former Commissioner Kathryn Garcia distributing food at Taft Houses, a NYCHA development in East Harlem. At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Mayor de Blasio appointed Garcia to lead the City’s emergency feeding program, GetFoodNYC. She coordinated the effort across multiple agencies (Health, Parks, Transportation, Environmental Protection, the Taxi & Limousine Commission, and NYC Emergency Management, just to name a few). And DSNY played an integral role in this work from its inception, with many units pitching in: Planning & Budget; Fiscal; Legal Affairs; Recycling & Sustainability; Public Affairs; and Enforcement. The Bureau of Information Technology created the City’s technological infrastructure needed to track food supplies. Volunteers from across the agency are working at food distribution centers and retired chiefs have answered the call of duty, even though they may have left the Department years ago. To date, the City has distributed over 130 million meals to New Yorkers in need. Photo by Michael Anton for DSNY.
