NEW YORK — Darkness was falling, but they could still make out the objects of their obsession: the degrading cardboard, musty plastic bags and waterlogged foam cups; Coke cans, beer bottles and coconut waters that showcased a diversity of local beverage tastes; and a broken umbrella that poked above the surface of a thick stew of food waste that even the rats left behind.
It was a weekday evening in March, and Rachael Cain and a dozen friends had gathered in the Queens neighborhood of Blissville. They were drinking beer at an Irish pub when the sky started to dim, so the volunteer cleanup group Pick Up Pigeons put down their pints and got to work digging, raking, picking and pulling scraps of trash.
Vehicles on the Queens Midtown Expressway sped overhead on a creaky elevated roadway. Down where the Pigeons toiled, two-foot piles of garbage cluttered blocks lined with storage-unit facilities, budget hotels, abandoned RVs and parking lots sealed with rusted razor wire.
“This actually looks like it’s already becoming soil,” Cain, 39, said, smiling as she raked up a pile of slop. “I don’t care what anyone else says, but this is delightful and why wouldn’t you want to do this?”
Cain, the founder of Pick Up Pigeons, is part of a growing network of New York City activists who clean up garbage for fun. The groups, whose numbers have swelled in recent years, now form an essential backstop for city officials’ efforts to try to keep this city of more than 8 million residents clean and presentable.
As they pick up litter in a city that generates more than 40 million pounds of waste each day, participants say they are forming friendships, strengthening community bonds and becoming a budding force in local political debates. They also see themselves as urban anthropologists, analyzing what people leave behind as a way to evaluate the health of the city.
“We want more people to realize that we all have a shared responsibility to keep our spaces clean,” said Catie Savage, founder of the Litter Legion, which has collected more than 15,000 pounds of trash in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood over the past six years. “When people in the neighborhood see 20 people coming down the block picking up stuff, I think it makes them think twice about throwing stuff on the ground.”
With names like TRASH Project and Clean Up Kensington, these environmental hobbyists view their work as especially important this spring after winter tested the city’s efforts to clean up after itself.
A major snow and ice storm in January, followed by a blizzard in February, left a stubborn snowpack that absorbed litter like a rancid sponge. When the snow finally melted, the excrement of a city was left behind. The Litter Legion, for example, picked up 192 pounds of trash in Hell’s Kitchen on March 1, double last year’s weekly average.
Many of the groups — recently dubbed the city’s “hottest clubs” by the local news site Gothamist — meet on weekend mornings and focus on a particular neighborhood. Others traverse the city looking for especially dirty places, including Pick Up Pigeons, which meets weekly at a bar in a different neighborhood to socialize before they head out.
As volunteers collect litter, they keep detailed records of what they find — including many highly unusual items. Savage’s group has found dentures, sex toys and a cardboard box “that had 10 to 15 plastic bottles in it with various shades of yellow liquid.” The Pick Up Pigeons, who have collected more than 16,000 pounds of garbage since its founding in 2023, have found diaries, boxes of onions and psychedelic mushroom chocolate, which was quickly consumed.
“The grossest thing we find is a lot of things inside condoms, a lot of weird things, and we just don’t know why,” said Alex Bodnar, 35, who leads Clean Up Crown Heights. “It’s one of those things you don’t question because you just want it off the streets.”
From the moment the Dutch colonized the area in the 17th century, disposing of trash has vexed New York City leaders, recognized as heroes when the city somehow gets clean and villainized when the trash piles soar.
“It’s been very uneven,” said Robin Nagle, a clinical professor at New York University who specializes in waste management. “There have been turnarounds and fallbacks and turnarounds and fallbacks.”
Established in the 19th century as “the Department of Streets” and later renamed the Department of Sanitation, the agency was set up as a “quasi-military-like” command structure, Nagle said. But budget cuts in the 1970s, and again by Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2010, hampered the department’s effectiveness for periods of time, Nagle said. During the covid pandemic, the city temporarily suspended street sweeping programs, causing another backslide in cleanliness.
Today, New York is probably “far cleaner than it was 140 years ago,” said Nagle, who also serves as the official anthropologist for the Sanitation Department. “But there are pockets [of the city] that seem perpetually challenged with street litter.”
The Sanitation Department, which now has 10,000 employees, has always relied on New Yorkers to help.
At the turn of the 20th century, the city used schoolchildren to help clean up litter while also educating their parents, many of whom were immigrants who didn’t speak English, about proper waste management. In 1969, a Puerto Rican civil rights group, the Young Lords, held weekly street cleanups in East Harlem to highlight the racial and economic inequality that existed in city garbage collection.
But Nagle said she can’t recall another period when so many New Yorkers seem to be gravitating toward neighborhood litter campaigns. Halima Johnson, director of volunteer programs for the Sanitation Foundation, which gives grants to cleanup groups, said “covid was a turning point.”
“People were looking for ways to get out and make a difference,” Johnson said. “And taking action gives one a sense of control.”
The foundation now hosts an annual “trash academy” that educates people about waste management and neighborhood cleanups. About 1,550 people attended the camp this year, more than twice as many as last year.
“We are seeing a bigger push toward collectivism,” said freshman city council member Justin Sanchez (D), the chairman of the Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee, who successfully campaigned last year in his South Bronx District on a “Clean the Damn Streets” platform. “The younger generations believe we need to be working in tandem with each other.”
There are many breeds of Pick Up Pigeons.
Some “just think it’s fun to find spaces where at first, it’s dirty and now it’s not,” said Cain, a corporate lawyer who lives in Brooklyn. Others view their work as part of a broader resurgence in liberalism in New York City that culminated with the election of Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as mayor last year. Some, Cain said, are “neurodivergent” and find pleasure in processing and documenting what they find.
And at least one, a 50-year-old Pigeon named Ike Hull, does it for the most relatable reason of all: “You got gloves on and don’t want to be touching your phone,” he said, “so it’s a rare two-plus hours without your phone.”
After Cain and Hull left the bar last week, they made their way down both sides of Borden Avenue, located under the expressway. A portion of the group raked up trash while others stacked it into garbage bags, some of which eventually weighed more than 50 pounds.
“Oh, that’s a dead bird combined with other stuff,” Cain said as she raked, eventually revealing an abandoned high school French book.
The group did not know what to do when it encountered an abandoned box truck, its side ripped open to the elements, with dusty suitcases and ratty clothes spilling into the street.
“This is one job too big,” Cain said.
Just past the truck though, they found a more manageable task: collecting plastic grocery bags clinging to an abandoned door.
Pigeons groups often keep meticulous records of what they find, from last year’s 360 discarded bottles of vodka to more than a dozen bottles of suspected urine so far this year.
Savage, of the Litter Legion, said tracking her group’s haul helps document her neighbors’ quality of life. She believes, for instance, the public drug use that soared in Manhattan during the pandemic peaked in 2023, when she collected more than 200 syringes during her cleanup efforts. She also knows that one volunteer can pick up about 500 cigarette butts in a span of four blocks.
“Looking at trash on the street,” she said, “really gives you insight on what is happening in the community.”
As Pick Up Pigeons worked next to graffiti-covered walls in Blissville, they stumbled upon a box holding 15 dozen eggs that had been picked over by birds or rodents.
“This invites questions,” Cain said. “Maybe it’s a grocery store, but why toss it here?”
But as the Pick Up Pigeons wound down and returned to the bar to debrief over more beer, 30-year-old Luis Bossa said he tries not to dwell on why his neighbors leave behind so much trash.
“There are millions of people in this city,” Bossa said. “We never will be able to figure out why.”
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