‘Don’t Do New York Dirty’ Means ‘Don’t Litter’

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a new campaign aimed at one of those seemingly intractable New York problems: littering. We’ll also get details on why more than 100 NASA scientists are moving out of a building that television viewers know from the sitcom “Seinfeld.”

Can New York change its habits about littering?

That’s the question behind a new advertising campaign that comes at the end of a week when there has been reason to think that habits in New York can change.

New York Today on Tuesday looked at congestion pricing. By most measurements, after four months with a toll on traffic heading into the busiest part of Manhattan, drivers’ habits have changed. Equally important, for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is the revenue that congestion pricing is bringing in.

The new anti-littering campaign isn’t charging litterers, and it isn’t paying people not to litter. The creators of the campaign acknowledge that it may not bring about change as quickly as congestion pricing has. The slogan, repeated in commercials that will be broadcast on television and shown in movie theaters and on sanitation truck posters, is: “Don’t do New York City dirty — trash your trash.” One of the people who came up with it is Pam Harris, the president of the Sanitation Foundation, a nonprofit that works closely with the city’s Department of Sanitation.

Harris, who helped think up the Knicks’ “Go, New York, Go” motto in the 1990s, talks about “creating a culture of cleanliness.”

“It’s not going to happen today or this month,” she said. “We have to start sometime.”

And somewhere, which turned out to be Cooper Square in Manhattan. The foundation, working with Team Epiphany, a marketing agency, set up an installation there called the “Dirty Truth Street Exhibit.” It features larger-than-life sculptures of everyday trash — the shoulder-high core of an apple, an outsize blue-and-white coffee cup and a damaged-looking MetroCard, among other items. The installation, with plaques explaining how real trash is not just an eyesore, will be open on Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Echoing Harris’s idea about changing the culture on littering were Sanitation Department officials who joined her at the exhibit, among them the acting commissioner, Javier Lojan. Two City Council members, Shaun Abreu and Erik Bottcher, were also on hand.

“People think New York just has to be dirty,” Joshua Goodman, a deputy sanitation commissioner, said before the gathering. “If someone comes in from Boston or Amsterdam or Tokyo and says to you, ‘Why do New Yorkers live this way,’ for far too long, our answer as New Yorkers was, ‘How dare you tell me that I should do something differently.’”

Underlying that response was “the No. 1 enemy of the trash revolution,” he said.

“It’s not piles of black bags on sidewalks, it’s not even the rats,” he said. “It’s the cynicism that we cannot have a better city. It’s not as if dropping litter on the street is some sort of New York City birthright.”

Bottcher said he was on the way home from the gym one night recently when a driver opened his car door and threw a coffee cup on the pavement. Bottcher, without identifying himself, said something like, “Come on, man.”

“He proceeded to tell me where to go and how to get there,” Bottcher said. “What is it that makes someone think they can just put trash on the streets?”

Goodman said that the Sanitation Department had accelerated enforcement: Notices of cleanliness violations are up 60 percent from when the Adams administration took office in 2022. The department now uses cameras to issue violation notices to the owners of vehicles that litter is thrown from.

But roadside trash is only a fraction of the litter in New York. A survey for the Sanitation Foundation found that 83 percent of New Yorkers consider littering a problem, but 38 percent of those questioned admitted to littering. The survey also found that 18-to-34-year-olds were the most likely to be chronic litterers.

Harris said that the “Don’t do New York City dirty” campaign was “the start of a generational change.” She said she had studied other antilittering efforts, notably the “Don’t mess with Texas” campaign in the 1980s. “‘Don’t mess with Texas’ got to be such a successful slogan that many Texans forgot it had to do with litter,” she said, “because it tapped so perfectly into Texans’ pride. They thought it was, like, from the Alamo.”

Besides the commercials and videos for the “Don’t do New York dirty” campaign, the city will put images with the slogan on sanitation trucks and on LinkNYC kiosks. The advertising agency Arnold NY put the commercials together with video directed by Nicolas Heller, the film director and social media personality known as New York Nico.

Weather

Expect a foggy morning with a chance of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon. The temperature will climb to the mid-70s. In the evening, the rain will continue, and the temperature will dip to the mid-60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).

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NASA moves out of a ‘Seinfeld’ haunt

It appears to be another example of the upheaval brought on by the Trump administration’s push to cut the federal government: More than 100 people who work for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies are packing up and moving out of offices it has occupied for almost 60 years.

The building they are leaving, at Broadway and West 112th Street, is recognizable. Their offices are upstairs from the diner that was a regular scene-setter in the sitcom “Seinfeld” and the inspiration for a Suzanne Vega song.

But now NASA has canceled the lease amid the Trump administration’s cost-cutting, although the move appears unlikely to save money. My colleague Sharon Otterman writes that Columbia University, which owns the building, maintains that the government still owes $3 million in annual rent, whether the scientists are there or not.

NASA says the institute has “a significant place in the history of space science.” In 1988 its director at the time was the first scientist to warn Congress about global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The climate model run by the institute’s scientists predicts how Earth’s climate is changing, and they examine prospects for human habitation on Mars and other planets. The institute’s researchers were involved with robotic spacecraft missions to Venus and Jupiter.

But last month the president signed an executive order calling for a re-examination of all leased federal office space, particularly in urban centers, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency began reviewing NASA’s spending.

It’s not clear where the Goddard scientists will go. Bethany Stevens, NASA’s press secretary, said in an email that they would be “placed on temporary remote work agreements” for the next several months, while NASA “seeks and evaluates options” for new office space. Columbia is also searching for new space for the scientists who work at the institute, many of whom also teach at the university.

The move is another blow to morale among Columbia’s scientists, who have watched funding evaporate for hundreds of federal grants this year after the Trump administration withdrew about $400 million in federal funding from the university, citing antisemitism. Columbia recently laid off about 180 employees in the sciences.

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