Tuesday, October 8, 2024 – THINK OUR STREETS ARE DIRTY NOW!

By admin

A FORGOTTEN PLAQUE INBROOKLYNPUTS A SPOTLIGHT ON THE CITY’SFIRST OFFICIAL STREET CLEANERSEPHEMERAL NEW YORK

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2024

ISSUE #1323

On an unmarked brick building in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn is a metal plaque. Weathered from age and neglect, the words “City of New York” and “Department of Street Cleaning” stand out in bold letters.

This easy-to-miss plaque, just shy of the Brooklyn Bridge, dates back to at least 1921, when Brooklyn resident Alfred Taylor became the longtime head of the Department of Street Cleaning, and John Hylan was the city’s mayor.

The department, headquartered in Manhattan, had branches in each borough. Presumably this brick building was the Brooklyn outpost—an ideal place to store machinery, shovels, brooms, and vehicles, as the area was a gritty waterside manufacturing enclave with few residential neighbors.

The plaque doesn’t provide any information about the Department of Street Cleaning. But in 1881, when the department was officially created, it filled a desperate need.

Up until then, the city’s Street Cleaning Bureau worked under the auspices of the Police Department. The men in this crew (below illustration) were tasked with keeping ashes, garbage, horse manure, snow, ice, and other “light refuse and rubbish” from mucking up New York’s notoriously trashy thoroughfares.

Bureau workers were not particularly successful, and city residents continued to be disgusted. The need for street cleaning was also increasingly seen as a health issue, as scientific advances demonstrated how unsanitary conditions could spread disease.

So the men employed by the new Department of Street Cleaning hit the streets. They were now part of city government, which gave them a sense of professionalism as they cleaned up after tenement dwellers who hurled household trash out windows and drivers who left horse carcasses in gutters rather than pay to have them properly removed.

That professionalism was heightened once George Waring, an engineer and Civil War colonel, took over the department in 1895. Waring instilled a military-like structure that mandated crisp white uniforms—hence the new nickname for department employees, the White Wings.

Roughly a decade after the plaque was in place, the department came to an end. In 1933, the Department of Sanitation was created, which took over the task of street cleaning and is still in charge today.

But I like that this plaque remains—a reminder of the men who day after day tackled (and continue to tackle) a thankless and often unseen responsibility: keeping New York City’s streets clean.

[Second photo: Alice Austen via NYPL Digital Collections; third illustration: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth and fifth photos: Bain Collection/LOC]

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15TH, (DATE CORRECTION)
6:30 PM. GALLERY RIVAA

Chris Vail is a documentary and news photographer.

Some of the work displayed on this site is part fo a project on regional Mexican music. It started as a photo essay for the LA Times on music in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The research for that assignment opened up a rich world of traditional music where the different genres of Mexican son vary by geographic location and historical influences.

Chris currently lives on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

JUST FOR FUN!
BRING BACK MAD MAGAZINE!

ON VIEW AT THE NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM 
IS A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF ALL THINGS
MAD MAGAZINE,
IT IS A MEMORY FILLED EXHIBIT, IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASS.

CREDITS

EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

JUDITH BERDY

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