This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
On radiant, sunlit afternoons, Wilma Atwell – or “Bee,” as she’s known in her neighborhood – likes to go out in front of her colonial-style house and water her garden.
Each afternoon, just as the sun starts winking over the plaster and stucco facades of her neighbors’ brownstones, Atwell unravels her coiled hose and gives the sea of yellows, purples, reds and green that flow forth from her periwinkle-sided house a good soaking. When she’s finished, the retired children’s wear designer takes a seat on the red-bricked steps in front of her porch and deeply breathes in the evening air.
“It’s so nice here,” she said. “I’ve been living here 21, 22 years. I love it.”
Eleven blocks west and 14 blocks north of Atwell’s “farm house,” as she likes to call it, a man dressed head-to-toe in black rifles through a plastic trash bag, four feet long and stuffed with the castoffs of the college students that live in an adjacent building.
Surrounding him are more than 30 bags of a similar shape, stacked haphazardly on the curb alongside splintered wood furniture and two worn-out mattresses. Together, they impede the sidewalk and take up an entire loading driveway, rising as high as the roof of the tan Volvo station wagon parallel-parked next to it. The man has torn a hole in one of the bags, and is pulling out the half-eaten bagels, tattered sneakers and crumpled cereal boxes inside and scattering them on the sidewalk, presumably searching for something salvageable.
For the next five days, the pile and the surrounding debris will remain on the curb, exposed to two more rummaging men and a heavy overnight downpour before sanitation workers make their rounds. Twelve hours later, another pile reappears, ready for the next pickup.
Though a little over a mile apart, Atwell’s home on Macdonough St. and the pile of refuse on Taaffe Pl. have something in common: they are both in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
For Atwell, the foliage on her street is the result of the collective effort to keep up Brooklyn’s “Greenest Block” of 2007, a stretch of brownstone Brooklyn so lush that it has been awarded distinction almost every year since Bill Clinton left office. Atwell said she and her neighbors take pride in keeping their streets polished, which is probably why Bedford-Stuyvesant is a recurring player in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s annual competition.
On the other hand, the Taaffe Pl. garbage heap is frank evidence that confirms statistics from the mayor’s Office of Operations rating Bedford-Stuyvesant as the trashiest neighborhood in all of New York, with the lowest percentage of “acceptably” clean streets in the city in 2006. That’s worse than Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx and Chinatown – all areas known for their commercial foot traffic.
This is the juxtaposition in Bed-Stuy: a largely-residential neighborhood known for its historic housing stock but plagued with a history of illegal dumping and out-of-control litter. Residents say they agree that the neighborhood is neglected equally by the city and its own inhabitants, and they’re tired of picking up after someone else.
What they can’t agree on is how to fix it.
Atwell says she’s experienced the effects of the litter habits of passerby right in front of her home, with crumpled Doritos bags and flyers from nearby Lewis Ave., peppering her cherished block.
“In the winter time, the flower pots become garbage cans,” she said. “We try to keep perennials in there to combat them. People must be too lazy to follow the rules. It’s ridiculous.”
Many people make matters worse by putting household trash – like small appliances – in corner trash containers, Atwell said.
“If there is a can, it’s a target,” she said.
Leo De Leon, owner of De Leon Realty and founder of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Business Alliance, said commercial areas of the neighborhood have “a severe rat infestation” thanks to the potent combination of ongoing construction and exposed trash.
“Last night I’m driving down the street, and running right next to me is a big rat, and people are screaming,” he said. “They’re running up and down the streets. Literally you can stand out there and count them sometimes. One day I was out there on Fulton St. and I counted 19 rats, and then I stopped counting.”
A lack of trash cans on the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares is partly to blame for the litter overflow from commercial zones, De Leon said.
“The containers are not there,” De Leon said. “Fulton [St.] and Nostrand [Ave.] is probably one of the densest intersections with the highest amount of commerce in the city. They would need four litter baskets on every intersection. There’s not one on every corner, and there should be.
“Commercial areas usually have a basket on every corner. Here in Bed-Stuy, whether it be commercial or residential, you can’t find a litter basket.”
Charles Atwell, Wilma Atwell’s 75-year-old brother-in-law who is the landlord of several buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said the Department of Sanitation’s inconvenient schedules are to blame.
“They take the garbage Sunday, but residents take their garbage out Monday morning on their way to work. Then it sits until Wednesday,” he said. “That rat-feeding schedule takes the incentive out of people.”
Atwell, who also owns a realty business on Stuyvesant Ave., said there’s a fundamental flaw in removing bagged trash from metal, critter-proof trashcans to put on the curb for pickup.
“They tell you to put your trash out in rat-proof plastic bags,” he said. “Problem is, there are no rat-, dog-, bird-proof bags.”
Rev. Darryll Young, the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church on Jefferson and Marcy avenues, said he believes the current procedure for putting out trash can be improved.
“I think part of it might be that they don’t have a single accepted container in Bed-Stuy,” Young said. “In some cities, like Rochester, they give you a container. They need a more sophisticated system. It would be a lot easier [for sanitation workers] not having to lift bags if they had a standard container.”
But even though Bedford-Stuyvesant is on the upswing, year-to-date data from the mayor’s Office of Operations tells a different tale: that Bed-Stuy, despite improvements, is still the trashiest neighborhood in the city, with 86.8 percent “acceptably clean” streets in the first three quarters of 2007.
De Leon said looting within the neighborhood has undermined local and city efforts.
“I spoke to the Sanitation Department, the supervisor for this area, and he told me he put out some 200 receptacles,” De Leon said. “Quite a significant percentage of what he put out was stolen. So that would leave many of the intersections without receptacles.”
Back on Atwell’s block, the sun finally sets, obscuring the street’s luminous flower display from view. For only a few hours, Brooklyn’s “Greenest Block” has turned to shades of midnight gray, but it’s just enough of a window for a single, untied plastic trash bag, gleaming under the streetlights, to appear beside an already filled-up city trash can on the corner of Atwell’s street and Lewis Ave.
Three blocks south, at Fulton St., 50-year-old Joe Grant is shuffling down the sidewalk, armed with a broom and rolling bin and clad in a blue jumpsuit stamped with “Ready, Willing and Able” on the back. Grant is a street cleaner for The Doe Fund, Inc., a non-profit organization that provides assistance to the homeless and the incarcerated after they are released from prison, and he and his band of men are assigned to clean up the Fulton St. commercial strip, picking up litter, re-bagging trash cans and installing new ones before city sanitation workers service the area in the early morning hours.
Grant said his thankless job is necessary because the area is always plagued by garbage, even if sanitation workers follow through with every scheduled pickup.
“Individuals who got nothin’ better to do, they might just tear the bags up and spread it all around,” he said, picking up a wet Burger King wrapper and dropping it in his plastic bin. “We clean it up.”