Picking Up by Robin Nagle

Why did I request Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle from the university library? If you did not chant "because the author was on You're the Expert" you have not been paying attention. 

If you get me talking late at night, I'll start talking about how worried I am about infrastructure. The electrical grid, water treatment plants, and the safety of nuclear warheads. I will discuss the food chain, the issues of local agriculture, and how many chickens have had to die in my county in recent years due to bird flu (2025 and 2026). I will rant about roads and bridges and sewage pipes. 

So when I picked up this book about Nagle, who really wanted to understand how sanitation works in New York City, my husband did nothing but sigh at me. Just like for a bit of time all I wanted to talk about was pigeons, he knew that all I'd want to talk about was trash. 

First up, I'm going to say something controversial. New York is gross for lots of reasons, many of which are enumerated in this book. It is impossible for the sanitation workers to keep up with trash in a city that size and the whole place smells disgusting. I have never had a good time in NYC and I refuse to apologize for this opinion. But imagine a time WHEN IT WAS WORSE. 

Back in the Tammany Hall days, NYC was ripe with corruption and the folks responsible for dealing with trash usually just took the money and did nothing. Until the hero of our story, Street Cleaning Commissioner George Waring, came along. Waring cleaned house and suddenly the streets were infinitely cleaner than they had been. These are photos that show the same places in 1893 and 1895. What a difference Waring made.  

Source

Anyway, New York was rife with vermin and disease and street cleaning and trash removal is super important. 

Nagel embedded herself in the world of sanitation workers by obtaining a job with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY). I have mentioned how much I love an ethnography and this is absolutely no different. She is puzzled over why sanitation workers are invisible in the city when she sees what they do as the most important thing in public health and safety. She introduces us to sanitation workers, rules and regulations, and the city's four hundred year-old struggle with trash removal. What an absolute treat (if you're an absolute nerd). 5/5 stars

Lines of note:

The garbage here and in every other dump in the world over reflects lives lived well, or in desperation, or too fast, or in pain, or in joy. Even without the status of worth or a claim of possession, each bag stuffed with trash, each wad of spent tissue, every shred of shrink-wrap, every moldy vegetable and maggot-covered turkey leg, hints of countless stories. Archeologists of contemporary household wasted have demonstrated this; indeed, insights that the field has given us about our own past often rest on analysis of nothing more than the garbage of civilizations long dead. (page 7)

There's another You're the Expert episode about an archeologist who gets really excited when finding dumps and privies. I feel like all of my interests are determined by YTE at this moment in my life. 

Effective garbage collection and street cleaning are primary necessities if urban dwellers are to be safe from the pernicious effects of their own detritus. When garbage lingers too long on the streets, vermin thrive, disease spreads, and city life becomes dangerous in ways not common in the developed world for more than a century. It is thus an especially puzzling irony that the first line in defense in any city's ability to ensure the basic health and well-being of its citizens is so persistently unseen...(page 17)

I can't even imagine modern life without trash pickup every week.

An alarming number of people seem to become cretins when they slip behind the wheel of a car. (page 20)

Dr. BB and I had been discussing how there is no one more entitled than an American behind the wheel of a car just before I read this. We're the same way, too. As soon as we start driving, we're dicks. Why is that? 

No city can thrive without a workable solid waste management plan. If sanitation workers aren't out there, the city becomes unlivable, fast. (page 24)

I mean, NYC is unlivable anyway, right?

Being a sanitation worker is more dangerous that being a police officer or firefighter. (page 57)

The BLS calculates that as of 2011..."refuse and recyclable materials collectors" hold down the nation's fourth-most-dangerous job, after fishermen, loggers, and aircraft pilots. (page 58)

Just FYI for the people who so admire police and fire.

Things I looked up:

peristaltic (page 5) - refers to peristalsis, an involuntary, wave-like muscle contraction that moves contents forward through a tube. This biological mechanism is most commonly associated with the digestive tract, but the term also describes specialized industrial pumps that mimic this exact squeezing motion

Blue-Collar Journal by John Coleman (page 17) - Blue-Collar Journal: A College President's Sabbatical is a 1974 book by John Royston Coleman, then president of Haverford College, detailing his experience working undercover in blue-collar jobs like a garbageman, sandwich maker, and construction worker during a sabbatical to bridge the gap between academia and the working class. (It goes without saying that I want to read this book, right?) 

Stuff by Frost and Steketee (page 239 - Chapter 1, FN 19) - Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee is an academic look at hoarding through a psychological lens. Hm. Maybe this would be good for me to read? Maybe not? 

Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star (page 251 - Chapter 16, FN 3) - Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star is about classification. That could be boring. Or interesting. Who knows?

Vogons (page 138) - The Vogons are an alien race from the planet Vogsphere who are employed as the galactic government's bureaucrats in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

"Blizzard of 1888" (chapter 18) - That link has it all. Great resources.

Hat mentions (why hats?):

In the summer especially, flesh shines as sweat trickles down necks, squeezes from inside elbows, drips from brows, chins, and earlobes, darkens T-shirts, soaks bandannas and hat crowns. (page 53)

The adjacent picture shows a white man in hat, gloves, and boots (no apron) with a wide washtub, also heavy with debris, balanced on his head. The text does not say whether he's wearing padding under the hat...(page 55)

Suddenly san men who'd had long hair since they'd been hired years before were told to cut it, make it disappear under a hat, or take a rocket. (page 133)

It's not as if New Yorkers are going to run out of their homes and stop you from picking up their garbage because your hat's on crooked. (page 133)

Red-jumpsuit-clad Times Square Business Improvement District workers give away hats, boas, pom-poms, balloons, eyeglasses...(page 146)

...standing in the back of our little group, my hat pulled low, I considered the foreman's youth and suppressed a smile. (page 197)

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What's your take on reading books about niche communities or industries? Would you like to read this book? Do you think I'm wrong about New York City?