The barge is now in its 41st day in search of a resting place for its cargo, with Lowell L. Harrelson, the contractor in charge of the barge, still frantically searching for a state or country willing to take his outcast garbage. Mr. Harrelson, who has failed to dispose of the garbage in North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mexico and Belize, said the barge was 150 miles due west of Tampa, Fla.
What the barge has done, to some extent, is prod elected officials into taking action. In a speech to solid waste management officials today in Washington, Senator Quentin N. Burdick, the North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Environment Committee’s Subcommittee on Toxic Waste and Hazardous Substances, said he would focus his attention on making landfills or incinerators more palatable.
“I am determined,” he added, “not to let the garbage barge—the so-called Flying Dutchman—now being towed around the Gulf of Mexico waiting for a storm, become a permanent symbol of our inability to deal with a growing crisis in handling municipal solid waste.”
Fresh Kills Landfill Comes to End of Its Run
By KIRK JOHNSON | March 18, 2001
In Staten Island, bulldozer compactors were left idle after the Fresh Kills landfill closed.
SOMETIME OVER THE NEXT WEEK OR SO, THE last barge will bring its load to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, and then, in a stunning anticlimax, the future will arrive and that will be that. The last of the New York landfills, a place that has defined the nation’s trash disposal dilemma for millions of Americans, will end its run.
Few will mourn the passing of Fresh Kills. Its name is etched on too many 10-worst lists, its stench too great a symbol of all that Staten Islanders endured.
But the deepening silence in southern Staten Island, environmentalists, waste experts and politicians say, is also, in a strange way, revealing Fresh Kills as though for the first time. The distractions during its life—its immense scale, its hectic activity and especially the chronic controversies of its creation and its impact on the environment—have been muffled. The marks that it left on the New York psyche, and the imprint that millions of New Yorkers left upon it with the things they discarded, are only now emerging.
Fresh Kills (1948–2001) was a baby boomer’s landfill. It opened just as the miracle plastics developed during World War II were reshaping what people used and threw away, and as the consumer culture of convenience was about to unfold. Staten Island, meanwhile, was largely rural and politically powerless—connected to Manhattan only by a ferry line—a reasonable place for things that were thrown away, or so decision makers said.
The landfill’s life spanned what waste experts call the Age of Disposability in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when the use-and-toss lifestyle of butane lighters and plastic foam hamburger boxes reached its pinnacle. Environmentalists say that sometime in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, the pendulum began to shift back. The health care industry began turning back to the idea of resterilizing hospital equipment and using it again. The auto mobile industry, under pressure to cut costs, changed the way it packaged parts and began recycling. McDonald’s went back to paper wrappers.
The overall amount of trash per person in the nation and in New York City has continued to climb, according to Sanitation Department figures, but some experts say they are cautiously optimistic that a corner has been turned. Business attitudes have changed. People are aware of limits and environmental costs in a way that the planners of 1948 were not.
“It’s like turning an ocean liner,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit conservation group. “The orders have come down, but it takes a long time to know whether you’re really turning.”
Parking By Meter Goes Operational
By JOSEPH C. INGRAHAM | September 20, 1951
SLOT-MACHINE PARKING WENT INTO operation here yesterday, 16 years after the first parking meters in the country were installed in Oklahoma City.
Acting Mayor Joseph T. Sharkey dropped a borrowed dime in one of 25 meters installed on West 125th Street between Seventh and Lenox Avenues, and for the first time New York started collecting a fee from motorists for use of the streets.
Mr. Sharkey, filling in for Mayor Impelliterri, on vacation abroad, made a short speech in which he declared that if the city’s test of meters was a success, “as I have every reason to believe it will be,” the administration intends to install 25,000 to 30,000 meters throughout the city in the next few years.
For the first time New York started collecting a fee from motorists for use of the streets.
As soon as the dignitaries had left for a luncheon at Frank’s Chop House, 315 West 125th Street, to mark the historic occasion, motorists moved into white-lined stalls that delineate the metered parking places. Two motorcycle policemen on new three-wheeled low-gear vehicles also moved into the area and by 6 p.m., the end of the paid parking day, had served summonses on three overtime parkers.
New Meter Eases Parking, Once You Get Used to It
By THOMAS J. LUECK | June 19, 1999
FOR THE INTREPID DRIVER TRYING TO PARK legally on Manhattan streets, here’s a new test. What is a Muni Meter? (A clue: it’s from Europe.) And how do you use it? (Another clue: it takes quarters, and be sure to take the receipt.)
Such is the puzzle posed by the New York City Department of Transportation in an experiment, now in its 10th month, at 12 spots in the city where more than 600 battered, comfortably familiar parking meters have been replaced by 41 newfangled parking gizmos. Under blue signs reading “P-Muni Meter” atop eight-foot poles, they have spawned a minor revolution in parking habits.
City officials have now deemed their experiment a success and are planning to install more of the machines this fall. Sometime soon, they say, the Muni Meter may be on a curb near you.
First-time users may find the biggest surprise is that the Muni Meter, unlike the parking meter, will probably not be located next to their parking space. As an example, the block along West 72nd Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway provides a model of Muni Meter logistics since six of the new devices have replaced 60 parking meters. Drivers are required to walk as far as five standard parking spaces to reach a Muni Meter box and insert their coins.
Receipt in hand, the driver is required to return to his or her car. Then, as a final step, the receipt must be displayed on the car’s dashboard in clear view of any passing traffic control officer, providing precise information on how long it can be parked legally.
If that sounds simple, the current Muni Meter experiment is being mounted against a legacy of frayed nerves and municipal backtracking.
“We have a culture of feeding parking meters that is hard to uproot,” said United States Representative Anthony D. Weiner of Brooklyn, who, as a member of the New York City Council in 1994, was instrumental in persuading the Department of Transportation to abandon its first experiment with Muni Meters, along a Kings Highway commercial strip in Brooklyn.
“People just couldn’t figure out how to use them,” he said.
On West 72nd Street, parking habits have changed, but not without problems. “At first, people didn’t know where to put their money, and some of them thought parking was suddenly free,” said Ed Schwartz, the manager of Tip Top Shoes, a store on the same block as the Muni Meters. The result, he said, has been a torrent of parking tickets.
No Need to Repark. Which God to Thank?
By JENNIFER 8. LEE | October 4, 2008
THERE ARE 43 HOLIDAYS THIS YEAR (SOME overlapping) on which alternate-side parking rules are suspended in New York City—10 days this month alone.
Some are national—Independence Day, for instance. But most are religious. There are so many that this week, for the first time in anyone’s memory, four religious-holiday parking days happened in a row: two days for Rosh Hashana, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and three days for Id al-Fitr, ending on Friday.
This proliferation of religious parking holidays is a result of a flare-up 40 years ago between
Mayor John V. Lindsay and just about everyone else.
Before cars, there were horses, and horse parking was not much of a sanitation issue in the city (though other horse-related matters were). But when cars arrived, the Sanitation Department complained in an article in The New York Times that parked cars made “the cleaning of the streets a nightmarish procedure—backbreaking, dangerous and unsuccessful.” Streets back then were cluttered with “sodden leaves, yellowing newspapers and decaying rubbish,” the article said. So alternate-side parking regulations started in 1951.
They were suspended by the mayor for many holidays by administrative discretion (much like snow days now). There were so many exceptions that in 1968, Mayor Lindsay announced that the only religious holiday (in addition to national holidays) for which the city would suspend the parking regulations was Christmas.
An immediate uproar prompted Mr. Lindsay, who had run with much Jewish support, to announce the next day that he would add Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. Two days later, he reconsidered again, and his office announced that it would ask the Sanitation Department to issue a report looking at which holidays would qualify. Finally, in 1970, Mayor Lindsay signed a law that suspended parking regulations on holidays, taking the issue out of administrative discretion.
The initial list included Christmas, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Good Friday, the first two and last two days of Sukkot, Shavuot, the first two and last two days of Passover, and all state and national holidays. Since then, the City Council has used the diversity of New York City to pile on the number of religious parking holidays. Everyone likes parking holidays except the Sanitation Department, which has to reassign workers to other tasks.
Of the days when alternate-side parking rules are suspended, 14 are Jewish holidays. But there is still a mother lode out there. Some Muslims have suggested that the rules should be suspended for the entire holy period of Ramadan: 30 days.
Dodge City, in More Ways Than One
By DAVID GONZALEZ | January 14, 1998
“There’s city pride associated with jaywalking,” said Justin Harrington, a senior partner at an advertising agency that studied pedestrian attitudes in New York.
IF YOU LISTENED CLOSELY TO THE SOUNDS OF the city yesterday, you could hear a giddy addition to the streetside symphony of bleating horns, cursing cabbies and rumbling trucks. Laughter—knee-slapping, get-real guffaws, in fact. The cause of this metro mirth? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s suggestion to crack down on the legions of curb-jumping Capones who have the criminal nerve to cross the street wherever they can.
“How can he do that?” said Carlos Llopiz, after breaking the current and rarely enforced jaywalking law on the Grand Concourse and 161st Street in the Bronx. “Can’t be. It’s dangerous to wait for the light. So many people are huddled together waiting for it to change. When it does, everybody is tripping over each other. I’m for crossing when there aren’t too many cars out there.”
Precisely when and how the mayor was going to step up enforcement of the law was unclear, but an informal poll of New Yorkers suggested that the mayor himself was a bit out there when it came to his latest quality-of-life idea. Most New Yorkers, it seems, accept some measure of low-level lawlessness as the price for big-city life. And in a city where cabbies honk and hurtle down streets oblivious to people or impatiently nudge into crosswalks while turning, jaywalking is a chance to share in the defiant joy of Ratso Rizzo’s cri de coeur from “Midnight Cowboy”: I’m walking here!
At the corner of Flatbush and De Kalb Avenues in Brooklyn, a boombox blasted out beats for a fitting soundtrack. “Move ya body! Move ya body!” And move they did, against the light.
“How can you tell New Yorkers they can’t jaywalk?” said Seedy Sanyand, who sold music tapes near the corner where he has seen a few people hit by cars. “This is a moving city. That’s why it’s a better place. It’s crazy. It’s beautiful. It’s dangerous.”
And complicated. Standing near Mr. Sanyand’s display of tapes, Tammy Robinson dismissed the jaywalker menace. “There are more important things the mayor should be worried about,” she insisted. “Let me tell you something. I’m homeless. They say I can’t stay in a shelter because I used to live with my grandmother. She’s 83 and wanted me out. The city says I have to stay with her. Now I’m going from home to home and people are taking advantage of me. Jaywalking? That’s absurd.”
Sometimes pedestrians don’t look where they are going. That’s why Nelson Melendez rigged his car to play a computerized voice whenever it was in reverse. “Attention,” the voice said as he pulled into a space on West 44th Street. “This car is backing up.”
“People jaywalk a lot,” said Mr. Melendez, a hotel doorman. “It’s pretty dangerous. Not only do we have to look out for ourselves. We got to look out for them, too.”
He excused himself and crossed the street. In mid-block and against the light.
Scoop It Up or Pay
By J. DAVID GOODMAN | June 5, 2008
View from a sanitation agent’s car as he cruises looking for violators in Brooklyn in 2008.
IT WAS JUST AFTER DAWN WHEN THEO OTIBU began prowling Ditmas Park in Brooklyn in his unmarked Sanitation Department car. He scanned the sidewalk for an elusive prey, the dog owner who does not scoop.
He spotted a woman in a long black coat leading a small white dog. Mr. Otibu, who has been a police officer in Ghana and a United Nations monitor in Bosnia, could see the telltale signs of negligent intent: the irritated expression, the hurried pace, the absence of a plastic bag in the pocket. “You can look at some people right away and say, ‘This person is not going to pick up after their dog,’” he had said earlier.
The woman and her dog made their way down the street, and Mr. Otibu trailed them. But after five long minutes of hushed stakeout, the dog did not go. Mr. Otibu drove on.
Dressed in plain clothes and driving white hybrid Toyotas, Mr. Otibu and the 14 other agents in the Sanitation Department’s Canine Task Force fan out across the five boroughs every day to enforce the city’s “pooper scooper” law, which went into effect 30 years ago and became the model for other large cities.
The city’s 311 complaint line received about 3,000 complaints about dog waste last year. The most summonses have been issued in the Bronx, with 335 in the first 11 months of this fiscal year, compared with 215 in Brooklyn, 157 in Queens, 109 in Manhattan and 53 in Staten Island.
“The more people you put out there, the more summonses you get,” said Sanitation Commissioner John J. Doherty. “We put more people on it. But still it’s not always easy to catch someone.”
By 9 o’clock, prime dog-walking time was waning and Mr. Otibu still had not found any violators. He was anxious. As he made a second trip around the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Seigel Street, he spotted a man in gray sweatpants with two dogs, one of which was crouching, off-leash. “I have him for the off-leash, but now I’m going to wait to see if he picks up.”
He did not. It was the moment Mr. Otibu had been waiting for. “I’m going to write him a ticket,” he said, getting out of the car.
The man showed Mr. Otibu his identification and a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card. He said that he was a police officer, but that he had forgotten his badge in his apartment. As he went with his dogs to retrieve it, Mr. Otibu wrote a $200 ticket for not having a dog on leash. When the man returned, he still did not have his badge. He took his ticket.
“I’m not sure he’s a real cop,” Mr. Otibu said. “But that’s not my problem.”
Parking Court: Everything But “The Devil Made Me Do It”
By AMY WALDMAN | April 26, 1998
As the demand for parking spots grows, the city’s regulations are becoming increasingly complex.
LOOKING SORROWFULLY AT THE JUDGE, THE young woman explained that her dog had been injured, and she had thought it more important to pay his veterinary bills than her seven parking summonses. Besides, she said, shifting in her suede jacket and leather pants, she was a struggl
ing actress.
“Economic hardship is not a basis to reduce or dismiss a summons,” said the judge at the hearing, which took place in Brooklyn. “But I will take into account the injury of the dog.” He reduced her penalties; she smiled.
With millions of parking summonses issued in New York City each year, some 5,000 people a day walk into one of the Parking Violations Bureau’s five “Help Centers”—one in each borough—and have a hearing on the spot. The traffic agent who wrote the ticket will not be there: it is just you and a judge waiting to be moved, or unmoved, by your word, your persuasiveness and any evidence you can muster.
Some people bring photographs or draw maps. A few drag in witnesses. They make their cases to administrative law judges—attorneys paid on a per diem basis—who in the Brooklyn center, at least, are crammed three to a room. Whether “Help Center” seems an accurate label or Orwellian euphemism depends, of course, on the verdict.
“Economic hardship is not a basis to reduce or dismiss a summons,” said the judge at the hearing, which took place in Brooklyn. “But I will take into account the injury of the dog.”
The Parking Violations Bureau adjudicated disputes concerning 2.6 million summonses last year. Guilty verdicts were handed down in 21 percent of the cases, not guilty in 35 percent, guilty with a reduced fine in 37 percent. The remainder were adjourned for later proceedings.
The rulings can often seem arbitrary. In one room, a man and a woman made virtually identical claims: by their watches, they had moved their cars just before “no parking” regulations had gone into effect. His judge believed the officer’s time; hers did not.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 41
