Garbage

New York City has a garbage problem. Not because we produce a lot of garbage, but because of our physical configuration. Manhattan, and nearly all of the area of the other boroughs, was laid out without back alleys. The street layout you see is the street layout you get. Worse, because of long-held habit of building the full width of lots, we don’t have places to put side alleys between buildings.[1] As a result, garbage has traditionally been left at the curb in front of buildings for collection.[2] This is bad. It looks bad, smells bad, and has traditionally fed rats which are not pets to be fed. Walker Evans gives us a photo of some good bins from 1938. After a number of proposed solutions over, I don’t know, the last century, the city has one that seems workable. A building’s garbage will be put, not on the sidewalk in plastic bags and plastic pr steel bins, but in the first street lane (the parking lane) in large identical containers that can be emptied by hydraulic lifts on a…