Trash wars

South End residents want to end the garbage picking that leaves their streets a mess. But to the scavengers, one man's trash is another man's treasure...

by Sarah McNaught

Under the long shadows of a four-story brick townhouse, a man walks slowly with a metal gadget in his hand. The stainless-steel instrument resembles a claw with a long, thin handle. It's trash pickup day, and the "picker" is the perfect tool for extracting cans and other recyclables from bags awaiting the garbage truck.

The sun has just risen over the ornate Victorian row houses that line West Newton Street, in the South End. Parked cars glisten with the remnants of ice that formed on the windows overnight. The stillness is broken only by the brief roar of a passing taxicab. The man with the picker heads up West Newton and takes a right down St. Botolph Street as the woman accompanying him treads in the opposite direction, crossing the street into the playground at the corner of West Newton and Columbus Avenue.

The silence returns, but it doesn't last long; another car turns onto the quiet, tree-lined street. This time the driver scouts the sidewalks, stopping momentarily to survey the metal trash cans and cardboard boxes that rest on the curb. A shopping cart rattles as an Asian man pushes it before him, his little girl riding in the front seat. The mother follows close behind, a young boy at her side. Armed with mesh bags and rubber gloves, they begin to open the trash cans, taking care to toss the noisy lids onto the small, grassy plots in front of the buildings.

Garbage is serious business in the South End. Trash pickers here stake out their territory and return to it up to four times a week. There are those who search for food and clothing -- the urban street dwellers who creep out from the shadows of a bridge or an alleyway in hopes of finding a meal or a warm blanket. But there are also working-class people from other neighborhoods -- as far away as the suburbs -- who venture into the South End in search of scrap metal, bottle deposits, or even furnishings for their homes.

Area residents are increasingly annoyed at the mess the pickers leave behind. The trash wars began a decade ago with the passage of the "bottle bill," which made empty drink containers redeemable for a nickel each. The frustration is gaining momentum as a massive revitalization campaign by the city and private developers brings an influx of young, upwardly mobile professionals into the South End. Many buildings have been converted from rental units into condominiums, and the new occupants' trash is other peoples' treasure. But these property owners aren't willing to turn a blind eye to the debris scattered by trash pickers who tear open bags in search of goods. Now, neighborhood associations have created a Web site (http://www.southend.org) that has been inundated with trash complaints and cleanup suggestions.

On March 23, concerned citizens from the South End's many neighborhoods will gather at the Boston Ballet building, on Clarendon Street, to present their demands to the city. The residents say trash picking causes a host of problems: that it fouls the streets, attracts rats, and even depresses property values. Yet the trash pickers say the problems are overstated. They say South Enders should stop being so concerned about what happens to the stuff they throw away.

---

Pots, pans, blenders with a small chip in the jug -- you find all kinds of things over here now," says Harold, a short, stocky gray-haired man with a barrel chest and a salt-and-pepper beard. "But it's not like the old days. . . . The goods have gotten better, but the people who live over here now are bitter critters."

Harold, 57, knows firsthand what it's like to be the target of hostility. The cross-country truck driver, who lives north of Boston, has been "street shopping" in the South End for 17 years. He ventures into the city on Saturday mornings to find "useables" for his trailer home and "sellables" for his neighbors.

Harold recalls a run-in with a resident in the Worcester Square area two years ago. It was a bitter cold winter morning. He was loading a piano bench into the bed of his blue Toyota pickup when a resident from the apartment building behind him appeared on the stairs and began yelling at him. Harold says he ignored the shouts until he heard the word bum.

"I work hard, real hard, and no pencil-pushing university type is going to accuse me of being a bum," he says. "So I tore open the two bags sitting next to the bench and dumped them right on the sidewalk. But I got my bench first."

A few weeks later, Harold toured the Worcester Square area again. This time he noticed a "newish" television stand in the front yard of the same building. It had a bucket of recyclables sitting on top of it, so he figured it was fair game.

"I hoisted the thing up onto my left shoulder, and wham! It was like the skies opened up and a river came flowing down on me," recounts Harold, reenacting the scene.

But he hadn't been caught in a downpour; he'd been doused with a bucket of water by the same resident who'd chastised him about the piano bench. "I was set up," he says, laughing. "That guy put the television stand close enough to the building so that he could get me with the water."

To the pickers, though, anything that's left out on the street is considered up for grabs. Residents' trash is a gold mine of leftovers -- from Tiffany-style bowls to antique mahogany telephone tables, from aging fruit to nearly full containers of gourmet takeout. And the better the garbage, the more pickers will come.

As aging homes are renovated, for example, construction companies discard valuable goods such as radiators, which can bring at least $75. One suburbanite has been gathering this scrap metal from the trash for the past 10 years. He loads copper into the back seat of his car and tosses other, less costly metals into the trunk.

"I would say, roughly, I can make $50,000 a year on the metal I get from the trash," says the "metal man," as his fellow trash pickers know him. "That's one hell of a supplemental income, and I'm doing the neighborhood a favor."

He is less concerned about residents' terminating his "second job" than he is about competition from the growing number of other trash pickers who frequent the South End.

"I used to know almost everyone out here," he says. "But now, new faces appear all the time. Everyone knows the goods are good in the South End."

For some, garbage picking is more a necessity than a way to make an extra buck. One East Boston man reluctantly admits that his family has furnished its home with other people's trash.

One day two years ago, the former shipyard worker remembers, his wife sat at an old metal table in their modest one-bedroom, sobbing. He had been out of work for more than three years, and the couple had no bedding for their newborn daughter; no toys, no high chair, and very little clothing.

"I was desperate. I put my coat on and began driving around the city, thinking about what I was going to do, when I saw a huge pile of stuff in front of a house in the South End," says the burly, brown-haired man. "There was a playpen that converted into a crib, a changing table, a diaper bag, and all kinds of other stuff."

He says he circled the block several times before he got up enough courage to stop and claim his finds. "I felt rotten the whole time, but that was something someone didn't want. If it helps someone else, taking it can't be a bad thing."

---

In the past three decades, the South End has undergone a renaissance. Listed by the National Register of Historic Places as the largest urban Victorian neighborhood in the country, the area is a hot spot for young business and artistic types. Well-off professionals have moved in, often renovating the charming red-brick row houses that line the streets. These newer residents are none too pleased when gutters overflow with filth, front stoops serve as catch-alls for loose trash blowing along the streets, and recycling bins lie ravaged by scavengers in search of bottle returns.

"I'm a property owner now, so I care a hell of a lot more than I did when I was renting an apartment in, say, the Fenway from some big conglomerate," says Arthur Wallace, who owns a condo on Rutland Street.

According to the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, home ownership in the South End carries a high cost. Studios start at $75,000, and townhouses currently sell for a minimum of $550,000. For such inflated prices, buyers expect well-kept surroundings.

"The gentrification of the South End has driven property taxes sky high -- some assessments have increased as much as 90 percent over the past year," says Mark Merante, a 31-year-old real-estate attorney who is president of the Claremont Neighborhood Association. "When residents are paying high taxes to enjoy a neighborhood like the South End, trash-strewn streets are unacceptable."

Aesthetic considerations are only one issue driving the crusade against garbage pickers. Some South Enders worry that the trash problem will taint the neighborhood's marketability. Others cite more serious health concerns.

Brook Webber, a 32-year-old marketing director, chose the ground-floor apartment in her South End building because of the gorgeous garden outside her living-room window. Her bedroom, though, looks into the alleyway. One morning she chased a trash picker away after he tore through the trash bags under her window.

That night, as she lay in bed, she heard what she thought was cats fighting. In fact, she discovered, it was rats, in a feeding frenzy amid the garbage. "I was utterly terrified," says Webber. "I can't put trash out now without being afraid that I will get scratched or even bitten by rodents."

Webber and other residents want the city to change the rules governing residential trash. They feel it is the city's obligation to protect the neighborhoods from the garbage pickers.

Trash pickers, though, are not the only problem; the new residents bear some responsibility for the mounting garbage crisis. As dilapidated historic buildings are converted into luxury condominiums, materials that should be disposed of in industrial dumpsters -- lumber, steel, and even valuable copper -- often get discarded with the regular trash.

Building renovations also push more trash onto the streets as common indoor trash areas are converted into living space and garbage pickup sites in back of buildings are turned into parking lots. Exacerbating the situation, the city removed many public trash receptacles from the streets when officials grew tired of residents' dumping household garbage in the bins.

Even those South End residents who use proper trash containers may be contributing to the problem by failing to observe the fine print. According to the Boston Code Enforcement Police, for instance, garbage must be put out no earlier than 5 a.m. and no later than 7 a.m. In theory, anyone who leaves trash on the sidewalk outside those hours can be fined $25.

Unfortunately, says four-year South End resident Aaron Weinert, many residents either don't know the rules or don't obey them.

"The longer trash is on the street, the more opportunity people have to pick through it," says the 30-year-old architect, who is co-president of the Chester Square Neighborhood Association. "In my neighborhood we have started calling Code Enforcement on people, or ringing their doorbells to inform them they are in violation of city code."

Jim Cahill, director of the Code Enforcement Police, says that the problem is being addressed. "We are trying to enforce as much as we can," he says. "It's still a problem area, but a turnaround is occurring." A trash officer has been assigned to the South End five days a week, the local police department is working with Code Enforcement, and the number of citations has increased from 85 in December to 125 in February.

---

Residents understand that trash pickers may mean no harm. And many even admit that they could do more themselves to stop loose trash from overtaking the streets and yards of the South End. Nevertheless, they feel that the city must set limits or the neighborhood will become nothing more than a big dumpster.

On March 23, the first draft of the South End Clean Up Plan, drafted by the Claremont Neighborhood Association's Merante, will be presented to the city. Code Enforcement officers, the mayor's neighborhood liaison, a representative from the city's recycling division, and perhaps someone from the Department of Public Works will be on hand to discuss a list of 10 simple solutions to the growing problem of trash control.

The plan calls for new, lidded recycling bins to entice more residents to recycle. "If residents recycle, then there will be no need for many of the pickers to tear open bags in search of returnables," Merante explains.

The initiative also calls for an information campaign. Brochures detailing street-receptacle and recycling rules would be mailed to residents and provided to all real-estate brokers. Block captains would work with the city's recycling office to ensure compliance. And the names of violators would be posted in the South End News.

"We have to put a stop to the destructive trash picking that goes on," says Merante. "But we also have to inform residents that they, too, are responsible. We need higher fines and some sort of repercussion, such as no resident parking sticker, for anyone with outstanding violations."

Cahill says he is looking into a system used in San Francisco, where trash violators with delinquent fines are denied parking permits and driver's license renewals.

But as the early-morning dew settles on the patches of grass that dot the South End, trash pickers are thankful for those "thoughtless" residents who put their trash out early and who don't recycle.

"Think about it for a minute," says a bag lady named Norma as she pushes up the sleeves of her tattered brown raincoat -- another treasure from the trash -- and rummages through a bag of discards. "These people are too busy with their lives to return their cans. But I'm not. So why shouldn't I get the money, and at the same time be a good citizen?"

Norma giggles at the idea that she is helping the environment. "Hey, someone's got to do it," says the hunched-over, white-haired woman, loading another empty six-pack into her shopping cart and heading down Upton Street toward Shawmut Avenue. It's Saturday morning, and, to her, the boxes of empty beer cans and bottles lining the street are like "diamonds sticking out of the walls of a cave."

"This is my little nest egg. Now, why would anyone want to take that from me?" she asks. In the glitter of the early sunlight, she retreats into the distance, slowly wheeling her cart along the rough brick sidewalk. Wind-borne trash from torn bags -- napkins, newspaper pages, a Burger King cup -- swirls around her feet. Maybe she is calculating what she has earned that day.

Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught[a]phx.com.