Trash Finds

When I first moved to New York, what wowed me wasn’t the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t the colorful characters or the array of museums, shows, and films. It wasn’t even that guy that always walks around with his cat on his head. No, it was the trash.

My roommates and I furnished our apartment with finds for free, most of which I found on long walks around the Village. Here’s a selection:

• Small ironing board with cover (found near Veniero’s on a cannoli run on 11th St)
• Cork bulletin board (West 13th St)
• Framed Scott Mutter print (another East Village find)
• Two woven baskets (near Financial District)
• A dish-drying rack (12th and University)
• An expensive leather suitcase (12th St and 4th Ave)
• A swiveling stool (West 8th St)
• Comic book posters (free from Forbidden Planet)
• Two floor lamps (lower 5th Ave)
• Christmas decorations: bows, lights (East 12th St)

Finding stuff to use in the trash is downright easy, it just requires a couple of simple things:

1. Look. This is most important—make sure you at least glance at every pile of trash you walk by. You never know. Also check out FreeCycle and Craigslist.
2. You can open the bags. If you need to, or if you get really into checking out the garbage from that ritzy building across the street, just take a peek inside. Don’t make a mess.
3. Make sure it’s clean. Don’t, please, please don’t, take mattresses or stuffed armchairs. The possible risk of bedbugs is too great.
4. Stay away from cops and sanitation officials. Sometimes they will get mad at you for ‘recycling’.
5. Take it! Paint it, use it, hang it, whatever. It’s yours, and it’s free.
   

Small Changes

So I was rummaging around in the trash at the Strand on my way home from dinner a few nights ago, and I came upon another find: Small Changes, by Marge Piercy. The Strand, despite its venerated image as a bastion of the cosmopolitan (but fashionably cheap) literati, throws away scores of books every night—perfectly readable books, with perhaps a bit too much wear and tear, or a missing dust jacket. This book, along with the dual Italian-English translated script of Madame Butterfly, found its way into my bag.

Small Changes is a novel set and published in the early 1970s about three women struggling to remake themselves in the image they hold in their heads of the ‘perfect woman’. Fundamentally, it’s a novel concerning the beginning of second-wave feminism. While overt sexism seems to have been conquered, the book offers insight into scenarios that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end just so slightly. Beth, a protagonist introduced in “The Book of Beth”, does more of the photocopying and data entry than usual in her office job at MIT. So do, seemingly, the female office workers where I work in the Parsons administrative office. Recently I’ve noticed that the good ol’ hierarchy is still in place, at least in ‘my’ office. The lower-paid office workers are exclusively working-class and female. The Dean of the school is—you’ve guessed it---a comfortably situated man.

Have we come so far, after all?