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Investigative
Our Dirty Streets
This five-part, investigative series dug deep into the 13,000 tons of household refuse New Yorkers generate each day.
Article Ⅰ traced the problems of dirty streets to the door step of the Sanitation Dept.—finding mounds of uncollected garbage a few blocks from its South Bronx headquarters.
Article Ⅳ tracked down Unionized Sanitationmen's Assn. firebrand John DeLury, who gave a peppery interview.
ARTICLE Ⅰ
The Pile-Up
By RICHARD SCHWARTZ
The Sanitation Dept. headquarters in the South Bronx is located at 616 Casanova St. near the tip of Hunts Point. Take a walk in the neighborhood some day. Go four blocks east toward Halleck St. and Ryawa Av. You'll see fire hydrants left open in the dead of winter because of fires in uncollected refuse.
The water froths out onto mounds of burning paper, plastic scraps and construction materials that fill the streets almost from gutter to gutter. If you get there early enough in the morning, you'll see private carters and factory helpers dumping the rubbish and tossing matches into it.
Walk a half-mile over on Randall Av. until you hit a salvage yard at Drake St. A mountain of automobiles slopes over the yard's fence onto the sidewalk and into the roadway. If you walk around the cars, you'll stumble into another Sanitation Dept. depot.
DETERIORATION OF SERVICE
The conditions in Hunts Point could exist only if sanitation authorities allowed them to exist. They are illustrations—and not the only ones—of the deterioration of sanitation service in New York and what many citizens have come to feel is a half-hearted effort by workers and half-hearted attitude by their superiors.
Sanitation officials are quick to deny such assertions and say they are doing all that finances, manpower and weather will permit. Union leaders vigorously defend their men's work.
But there is no denying that the city is ankle-deep in garbage. It is estimated that 13,000 tons of household refuse are generated each day, fully 9 per cent more than a year ago and 40 per cent more than a decade ago.
On the other hand, collection service has seldom been worse. For every four cans scheduled to be collected this morning and afternoon, three actually will be picked up. One will be left standing.
The other possibility is that it won't stand at all. The spillage from upended or wind-blown refuse, added to other litter and assorted scatterings, amounts to 451 truck loads a day.
It will take its place next to more than 468 tons of abandoned refrigerators, mattresses and other bulk cast-offs and an estimated 1000 derelict automobiles.
In Queens and Staten Island, where pick-ups are scheduled only three times a week, there is a built-in 72-hour lapse between Friday's and Monday's collections.
On a recent morning, a housewife in Ozone Park, Queens, where collection crews call on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, rushed out her front door at the sound of the sanitation truck.
"You're late," she greeted the collection crew.
"No, we're not," one of the workers replied. "It's only 8:30."
"It's 8:30," the housewife rejoined, "but it's also Tuesday."
The collection crunch is on Mondays, yet hardly any accommodations are made for it in planning work schedules.
One-fifth of the city's collection crews, rather, are off from work on Monday. They choose it as their "chart day," a revolving day off that, under the department's policies, allows the average worker eight 3-day weekends each year.
Attempts to stagger the work force, sanitation officials fear, would incur the wrath of the powerful Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. and its peppery leader, John DeLury.
NIGHT 'MOBILE SQUADS'
The union apparently has been bidding for the establishment of night "mobile squads" as a solution to the problem. The mobile squads would be modeled after the Police Dept.'s fourth platoon and other special assignments.
It would be expensive. Budget planners in the Environmental Protection Administration, the superagency that oversees the Sanitation Dept., would prefer instead to offer premium pay to the sanitationmen as an inducement for Monday work.
Translated, premium means double pay. The added costs would amount to $1.4 million for the entire work force on the basis of an average of three extra Monday working days a year
The department's budget presently is $180 million, and the added expense, the planners believe, would be justified if it could assure an end to so-called "spillover" of Monday collections. Almost a tenth of Monday's work load is left undone.
Collection problems could get worse before they get better. The department expects that during the coming summer months 8 per cent of the work force will take 25-day vacation leaves.
And breakdowns of equipment are not helping things, either. The department boasts of having a fleet of 1,800 collection vehicles. Yet, although only 1,300 would be required to handle present workloads, it is able to dispatch only an average of 900 each day.
"They clean up Shea Stadium overnight, so why can't they clean Brownsville?" a poverty agency official in the Brooklyn community asked.
The failure to clean Brownsville, though, is more basic: nobody is trying to every hard.
On paper, it would appear the ghetto areas and poorer districts generally are being serviced by five or six collections a week. But, as the assistant foreman of one sanitation district confided, "it just doesn't happen." He said his men "scoop and scram.
Former Bronx Borough resident Herman Badillo charges the Sanitation Dept. has misused $350,000 that was specifically budgeted for a sixth day of garbage collection in the South Bronx.
"There aren't even three collections," he said. "It is four years since it [the money for a sixth collection] was mandated, but it's never been used for that."
Badillo says he can't put his finger on talk that some sanitationmen are taking payoffs to cart commercial rubbish. "I know nothing about that," Badillo said, "but misuse of the budget is worse than graft. This is $350,000 I'm talking about."
A spokesman for the department said $350,000 was the equivalent of the pay for approximately 35 workers "and we have certainly added more than 35 workers" to the area.
Part of the problem in improving sanitation in communities such as Brownsville is the antipathy of workers. "Why should I break my back?" asked the driver of a mechanical broom. "The minute I finish a block some janitor is going to sweep the mess from his sidewalk into the street and the place will look the same as when I came."
An equal part of the problem, some charge, is outright race prejudice. The subject was gingerly breached by one sanitation official.
"These are mostly Italian workers and, well, those are not exactly Italian neighborhoods they're working in." The official, who asked that his name not be mentioned, added: "The kindest word to describe their feelings toward the people in these communities might be `disdain.'"
An executive of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. branded the charge "ridiculous." Some "latent, little prejudice might exist," Al Katz, DeLury's executive assistant said, but more likely it is the "demoralization from the rough, damn winter."
EFFORTS AT IMPROVEMENT
A measure of good faith by the department is seen in its experiments with plastic bags. The bags have been furnished free to residents in several low-income neighborhoods where there is a shortage of metal cans. The upshot, say sanitation officials, has been improvements in the appearances of neighborhoods and an increase in collection efficiency.
The Environmental Protection Administration, which is seeking to revise the Health Code requirements for metal cans, is also considering large-scale use of roll-on, roll-off containers such as are now used by private carters. It also has held talks with architects to encourage design of indoor storage and pick-up facilities in new buildings, suited to container collection.
Four metal cans cost the city $27.50 a year to collect. the introduction of 1- to 3-cubic yard containers, mechanically hoisted onto the trucks, would bring it down to $22.
The department's new compactor collection trucks are equipped with a hoist which picks up larger containers, dumps their contents into the truck and lowers them to their original position. The vehicles can hold the contents of eight containers.
Union officials say they are all for containerization, though they are skeptical about the efficiency it—or the shift to compaction trucks—will inspire.
ARTICLE Ⅳ
John Delury
By RICHARD SCHWARTZ
He looks vulnerably small, John Joseph DeLury.
The 65-year-old leader of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. stands 5-5½, a squat, impish figure who seems lost in the mahogany sheen of an oversized president's desk. A swivel chair behind that desk all but swallows him up.
It's an illusory effect, for if nothing else John DeLury has demonstrated a larger-than-life assertiveness. He seldom speaks but in the imperative mode, and four-letter epithets are not unknown to him.
To the contrary, they are part and predicate of any bargaining sessions where his custom is to beleaguer and beguile adversaries. Though he can be a bully, DeLury is unfearing of intimidation by others. A case in point is the 15 days in jail which he spent for defying a court order to end the sanitationmen's strike.
His office demeanor is no less defiant. Should a conversation with a visitor get too mettlesome, there is always the swivel chair. With one tilt, DeLury can throw a cold shoulder; with another tilt, he can drop matters into the lap of an aide.
The aide, more likely than not, will be Jack Bigel. Officially a consultant to the union on pensions, Bigel is DeLury's double at negotiating sessions and, negotiating or no, is DeLury's dependable doer. One of the things he does is serve as a go-between in any encounters between DeLury and the press.
The two have been described by one city official as "the greatest song and dance team in labor negotiations."
"They (DeLury and Bigel) are masters of asking the sort of questions that if you answer, you're an ass, and if you don't answer, you're embarrassed," says the official.
So it came as little surprise that when a reporter asked DeLury to explain the facts of New York's dirty streets, Bigel quickly demurred: "Is that an impression or a fact—in which context do you place it?"
Alternately, one will be hardnosed and heated, and the other docile and conciliatory. With this tactic, the city official explains, "you end up thinking they've made a concession just in letting you talk with them."
"I would pay you if you would eliminate overtime," said DeLury, propping himself up in the chair. He had been challenged by the suggestion that his men drag their feet. The suggestion, he perceived correctly, was more on the order of an assertion, merely that the slower the sanitationmen go, the more the city has to schedule night and Sunday overtime.
As one worker has put it, "work is money"—but it's also an investment in the future. Under the terms of the sanitationmen's current contract, workers can retire at half pay after 20 years.
More than 1,000 men retired last year, and their half-pay was based on each man's total earnings in the 20th work year.
"Our men do not want overtime," insisted DeLury, gripping the arm rest and flinging his shoulder in a forward, aggressive posture. "Do not want overtime," he repeated.
"Downstairs [in the secretaries' offices] I'll bet you've got telephone calls from men telling they don't want to work tonight. The department has got to beg them to work."
PHYSICAL LIMITS
Bigel, his voice an octave lower, joined the conversation.
"As John says, they don't want overtime. They don't want overtime for one reason: it means an additional physical outlay of their energy. It doesn't mean they have to produce more carbon copies. You can recharge a battery, but you can't recharge or turn these guys on the next day.
"It's the difference between walking 12-14 miles and walking 20 miles each day," he went on. "It's the difference between lifting four tons and lifting five-and-a-half tons. It is still a matter of physical activity of the most arduous kind, and these men feel they have reached their physical limits after an eight-hour tour."
Despite the disavowals, the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. is using the issue of overtime as a bargaining lever in its current squabble with the city's Office of Labor Relations.
DeLury wants the city to give all the sanitationmen an immediate 8.7 per cent cost-of-living pay increase, even though the sanitationmen's contract does not expire till the end of the year. If the city refuses to reopen negotiations, DeLury has said his men will refuse all but their regularly-assigned work.
Last year alone, the garbage tonnage increased nine per cent, but the work force in the same period, by DeLury's count, increased only 2.8 per cent. "How much do you want us to do?" he asks.
"They [the sanitationmen] are frustrated," DeLury said. "You think they like to be held in ridicule by the public which never puts the blame where it belongs?"
It belongs, he suggests, with city administrators.
"It's the old army game," he said. "They pass it down from the Mayor to the department, from the department to the sanitationmen. But it belongs upstairs. Not with the guys that are performing the job, but with the guys who should give us the men to do the job."
There's an immediate need for 2,500 more men, according to DeLury, "and they should be concentrated—the bulk of them—on cleaning the streets daily.
"Because the department says they clean up five times a week in the ghettos—which I know they don't—and three days or two days in other parts of the city, to me that's not doing the job," said DeLury. "Doing the job is doing whatever is required, however often it is required."
"Everybody," DeLury said with an emphasis of finality, "should shut up if they don't use the weight of their office or whomever they represent to see that the city provides it."
Linda Fosburg, who worked for five years in the community relations office of the Sanitation Dept. and now heads Citizens for Clean Air, is not particularly a fan of DeLury ("he's a pistol," Fosburg says), but she does feel sanitationmen are "sympathetic figures."
"They have a pretty rotten life being sanitationmen," she says. "Who, for instance, would talk to the garbageman about something? You stop a cop on the corner to ask him something, and you stop a fireman, but would you stop your garbageman?"
It's part, Fosburg says, of a `please-don't-make-me-face-it' complex that people have about garbage.
GARBAGE NOT FASHIONABLE
Even many of the pollution foes, Fosburg says, shy away from the subject of garbage in deference to more "fashionable" environmental issues of air and water.
"A lot of people we deal with who are concerned with air pollution are middle-class types, who are much more likely to deal with garbage as a kind of excrement problem.
"They have never been to the South Bronx, they have never been to sections of Brooklyn where the garbage collection is just abysmal. They can't imagine taking on the whole city structure, about financing to buy new trucks and changing the shifts of men."
And the people in those communities have other concerns.
"Those persons who are up against the hardcore problem," Fosburg says, "are already so downgraded in so many ways that they can't get mobilized. They're seeing dope and prostitution and murders and rapes and everything else in their lives, and garbage is only one more of those problems."
One group, however, that did take the issue on is the Young Lords. One evening last August they sparked a garbage-throwing melee at 110th St. near Park Ave. in East Harlem to protest the lack of collection services. "It launched us as a group," says Yoruba Guzman, one of the leaders.
"At the time, it was used as a strategy, an overall campaign issue to mobilize the community," says Guzman. "We realized there is garbage in the streets and always will be garbage in the streets.
"Whenever we'd go and rap to the people on the stoops, we'd bring it up," he says. "People liked it—they got rid of a lot of frustration by throwing garbage."
He says "the situation of garbage hasn't improved, but the situation of people's spirits have." But, Guzman adds, "if anything happens this summer, it's there to use as a barricade—it's the best way to stop cars."
The reason garbage is at the bottom of the pollution barrel, thinks Columbia University urban planning professor Sigurt Grava, is that it's not considered a "life or death" matter.
"Any problem comes in degrees," said Grava. "You can put up a scale: at one end there's immediate danger of death—it's going to kill you—and at the other end of the scale you have a sort of esthetic uncomfortableness about something.
"Garbage is one of those esthetically uncomfortable things," he said. "There's, of course, some danger because it putrefies and gives off gas, but it's mostly just a nuisance."