Ash Can to Garbage Can

I am not nostalgic over what garbage cans used to look like, but I was reminded of what they did look like when I took in the obituary for Flo Fox, an accomplished photographer who captured NYC street scenes while only having vision in one eye. Ms. Fox eventually totally lost her vision due to multiple sclerosis.

The trash can that Ms. Fox captured in the above 1978 photo was obviously of a discarded mannequin, and not the remains of a headless body found in a topless bar that a New York Post front page headline gave us the news of on April 15, 1983.

Trash cans of the era before becoming rubber and plastic mounted on wheels! were made from reinforced galvanized steel, and were heavy as hell, even when empty. Their lids were steel as well, and depending on how the garbage men (sanitation workers) treated them on their route, would eventually sustain enough dents and dings that the lids no longer fit snugly on the top. They could look like crumbled aluminum foil. If they were cars, tow trucks would be towing them away to the junk yard.

In the era when coal was burned in city furnaces, trash cans were often referred to as ash cans. The homeowners and building superintendents would fill the cans with the ash from the furnaces. Our house in Flushing, built in 1923, was originally heated by coal. My parents shoveled coal into the furnace, and later removed the ash into those cans.

The dumpsters behind the stores in the nearby shopping center are owned and emptied by a company called Jamaica Ash, a name leftover from the days when it really was ash that was hauled away. Now it's basically foodstuff and cardboard (separate dumpsters).

I worked with a fellow who remembers going by his old apartment house in Brooklyn and seeing his old super still dragging the heavy metal cans out to the curb, now holding household waste, not ashes.  The guy must have been in his 70s or 80s.

The NYC Sanitation strike that I remember most was in February 1968 when John V. Lindsay was mayor. There were no many strikes by municipal workers during Lindsay's time as mayor that NYC was nicknamed "Strike City." The rough and tumble union leadership of these unions did not like the patrician guy from Yale. Firemen even went on strike.

When the sanitation workers in February 1968 went out, the garbage was not picked up. Period. It piled up in cans and paper bags on all the curbs. The strike lasted 9 days and the smells were ripe. The cold weather kept the garbage somewhat refrigerated, and a public health crisis was never called.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller would not call out the National Guard to remove the garbage. No one really understood why he didn't. I formed my own theory that he probably felt Guardsmen were not up to spending days lifting heavy garbage into trucks. I think the nickname for Sanitation workers has become "New York's Strongest" to match the firemen who are "New York's Bravest," and the police who are "New York's Finest."

While the print edition of the obit for Flo Fox reprints some of her photos, the online edition really puts on a show. I always love cityscape photos, and black and white always seems to suit them best.

I seem to remember the discarded mannequin one, probably from an anthology of NYC streetscape photos. 28 Perry is the address of where the cans come from, a West Village street, likely near where she might have been living at the time.

I follow the  X/Twitter feed of Corey Kilgannon, (@coreykilgannon), a NYT reporter who will occasionally post a NYC streetscape scene, probably taken with his cellphone, therefore in color. Despite Mr. Kilgannon's X/Twitter home page telling us he has 5,993followers, I seem to be the only one who posts a reply. 

To his latest posting I replied, "I don't know if I'd sit on that stoop. No privacy."

NYC will never disappoint anyone who works a camera.

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