The Leaning Tower of Refuse

How the "Trash Revolution" turned my morning walk into a high-stakes game of hopscotch over toxic bin water.

There is a new kind of walk New Yorkers have to do these days.
It is not a strut. It is not a stroll. It is a terrified, sideways shuffle, pressed flat against a brownstone to avoid touching the pulsating black mountains of shit that have colonised the pavement.

We are currently living in the new era of Mayor Mamdani, who swept into office promising a city for the many, not the few. Unfortunately, “the many” seems to include the rats

If you walk down my block right now, the revolution looks suspiciously like a surrender. The piles are miles high. They’re load-bearing trash bags. I am fairly certain some of the taller stacks on the Lower East Side are now technically zoned for residential occupancy. You can’t walk anywhere without navigating a canyon of refuse that smells like a combination of rotting papaya, stale beer, and the broken promises of municipal reform.

And then, there is the moisture.

I took Morris out for his morning ablutions today, and we encountered a pile so vast it had its own weather system. Morris, being a dog of refined taste, immediately identified this black plastic monolith as the most important object in the tri-state area. He peed on it. Of course he did. Everyone’s dog pees on them. In New York, a trash bag on the sidewalk is just a soft fire hydrant. He’d have gone on the traffic cone, but it was embedded in the nightmare like a scene from a frosty Pompei.

But it’s not just the dogs. Last night at 10pm, I saw a man in a suit pause, look around, and contribute to the ecosystem. It is a communal effort. We are all just adding our own unique fluids to the mixture, creating a kind of toxic gazpacho that leaks across the sidewalk and forms those dark, sticky puddles you have to leap over in the world’s most high-stakes game of hopscotch.