A History of Solid Waste Management in New York City: Where Every Day is Trash Day
written Fall 2022
Introduction:
Present-day New York City is home to over 8 million people who collectively produce more than 12 thousand tons of trash every day. This volume of trash production is viscerally apparent to residents and visitors alike; Anyone who has spent an afternoon strolling along the picturesque brownstones of Fort Greene, or has taken an early-morning shuffle off the subway into an office building in Herald Square can attest to the seemingly constant, brutishly imposing presence of garbage in New York. The waste management system in New York City as it stands involves individual residents or building managers placing bagged piles of residential trash in heaps along sidewalks three days a week. Beyond the obvious olfactory implications of this system, having massive heaps of trash lining sidewalks across neighborhoods and boroughs blocks pedestrian right of way and access to the street, in addition to cultivating pest presence. This, unfortunately, is by design.
New York City’s current trash collection system is an immense, highly visible, constant operation that ultimately hasn’t improved much beyond its origins, and yet the production and disposal of trash has massively shaped the City both geographically (through fill operations), and socially (through the constant physical presence of trash, inherent in the nature of the system itself). As the city begins to rebound from a devastating pandemic, it’s critical that planners and gov’t officials reassess all of the systems that influence the quality of our public spaces and affect public health.
In this paper, I will follow the history of waste management in New York City from the time the Dutch touched down in the mid-1600’s to present day, in an effort to contextualize the nuance and procedures of the current system of sanitation in the City of New York. I intend to examine what types of trash caused the most nuisance to public life, and how various types of trash were collected, treated, and disposed of. Lastly, I intend to address the different ways in which waste management has impeded on the public realm specifically, and pinpoint what holdover barriers exist from decades past that prevent the current system from improving.
1600’s:
From the time the Island of Manhattan was dubbed New Amsterdam by its initial European colonizers in 1626, New York City has never had a trash management system commensurate with the volume of trash the city produces. When the Dutch first began to settle into the Lenape land along the Hudson River, they were tasked with structuring their new society from scratch. This process quickly revealed that some level of order must be mandated over the way the earliest New Yorkers disposed of their waste.
Prior to any regulation, residents of New Amsterdam were left to their own devices. It immediately became customary for people to discard their garbage onto the streets to rot in heaping piles in the sun or snow, or into waterways to slowly poison them. Household trash at the time was a noxious combination of spoiled food, broken furniture, oyster shells, human excrement emptied from bedpans and buckets, dead animals – horses, chickens, and pigs – and their manure. At this time, and for decades later, the City did not make a distinction between solid waste and wastewater; All waste produced by an individual, a household, or a business was tossed onto the street or into a body of water.
The foul environment these practices created over New Amsterdam’s first two decades of existence lead to the very first law regarding trash management, which came about in the late 1650’s. The law forbode people from leaving “tubs of odor and nastiness” on the street or dumping them into the canals. Additionally, this new law provided guidance on five designated dumping sites where people were instructed to leave their garbage: The Strand of the East River, near City Hall along present-day Pearl Street, outside of the gallows at Pearl Street and Whitehall, near Hendrick the Baker’s at the North-West corner of Bridge Street and Broad Street, and at Daniel Litzkos at Pearl Street “near the wall” of what is now Wall Street. That said, there’s much evidence that the residents of New Amsterdam continued dumping their garbage in the City’s waterways and onto street corners instead of reliably abiding by this mandate, notably the fact that Pearl Street in lower Manhattan is itself named after all of oyster shells that notoriously lined the right of way there during this era (Meyers & Young, 2019, 5:50).
By the 1670’s, the British had snatched control of New Amsterdam away from the Dutch and renamed the burgeoning settlement after a hometown of their own: New York. Around the same time, businesses were growing and continuing to contribute massively to the unsanitary conditions of New York’s public spaces. In an attempt to improve the overall hygiene of the city, the British mandated that all industry take place North of the wall at present-day Wall Street. In the wake of this mandate, many of the industries relocated as they were told, and settled near a convenient locale to dump their waste: a former freshwater fishing site called Collect Pond, which was promptly tainted by filth and longer fit for human consumption (Meyers & Young, 2019, 8:23). Breweries, tanneries, and slaughterhouses that now called the shores of the pond home effectively transformed the body of water into an open sewer. The conditions of Collect Pond became so disgusting that by 1810, the City elected to drain it and fill in the basin (Kadinsky & Walsh, 2011). The issue of garbage accumulation in public spaces continued to exacerbate as New York City’s population grew, but organized cleaning of streets would not be dictated until the early 1700’s (Kaiser-Schatzlein, 2021).
1700’s:
In 1702, authorities first officially mandated trash disposal procedure for New York City residents, specifically dictating that residents were supposed to make piles of dirt outside, in front of their homes, on Friday nights so that the authorities could make collections on Saturdays (Kaiser-Schatzlein, 2021). The British, at this point, seemed to believe that this level of detail and management would suffice in keeping their streets clean enough to continue to be used. However, as the city continued growing in population and industry, more and more trash was produced and discarded haphazardly, and residents start to see worse and worse health impacts. More and more intense fevers – namely yellow fever - and a plethora of other diseases, many of which had formally been under control for centuries, plagued the residents of New York. These vile conditions continued to spur horrific outbreaks of disease. As New York became more and more crowded, the foul, unsanitary waste management practices continued, and disease became more and more exacerbated, spreading essentially completely unabated (Meyers & Young, 2019, 9:30).
1800’s:
By the 1800’s, The City of New York was very aware of the sanitation issue tanking public health and making public spaces uninhabitable, so much so that they deemed that they themselves did not have the capacity to manage the exponentially growing problem. In 1806, the City tried to outsource their waste collection to private contractors. This decision came with additional issues, however, as the private contractors were only interested in collecting waste that had resale value: the animal manure that could be resold to farmers as fertilizer (Meyers & Young, 2019, 10:21). It started to become clear to City officials that not all trash is created equally, and a one-size-fits-all approach to waste management wasn’t sufficient.
Additionally, infill operations had started to change the physicality of the city itself. By the turn of the 19th Century, 137 new acres of land in lower Manhattan could be attributed to marsh filling operations and water lots. Streets that used to run along the rivers – some even initially named for their proximity to water, namely Water Street – were now some 500 yards from the coast of Manhattan. The new land produced through infill created new locales for building, but the land that jutted into the rivers impeded shipping operations, threatening New York’s value as a port city (Kaiser-Schatzlein, 2021).
Despite several haphazard efforts by the city to manage the snowballing sanitation crisis, the massive volume of immigrants arriving in New York from Europe created denser living conditions that coincided with the beginning of industrialization. These two factors made bad conditions even worse, and the streets and waterways of New York stayed disgusting. A cholera outbreak ravaged New York City in 1832, and it became clearer than ever that the city needed a fresh water source. New York residents did catch a break in the mid 1800’s, however. In 1842, the Croton Aqueduct opened, funneling fresh water to New York City residents for the first time. This marvel of engineering, built over five years mostly by Irish immigrants who were paid up to one dollar per day for their labor, utilized the forces of gravity to transport water some 41 miles from the Croton River in Westchester County in upstate New York to two reservoirs in Manhattan. The Manhattan reservoirs were located at the present sites of the New York Public Library and the Great Lawn of Central Park. Prior to the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, New York City residents procured drinking water from a number of sources, namely cisterns, wells, and natural springs, as the rivers that flank Manhattan are brackish and therefore not potable. The dumping practices that destroyed the fresh water sources in and around Manhattan created an acute need for fresh water, and the Croton Aqueduct delivered, literally (Tarnowsky, 2021).
Despite this massive feat of engineering that would have long lasting impacts on the water system in New York City, conditions did not immediately improve. Medical professionals in the 1860’s had become so alarmed by how filthy the streets of their city were, compounded with the fact that residents were experiencing a resurgence of diseases that had formally been dormant since Medieval times, that they proposed some reforms to the system. Despite the fact that the City had started budgeting funding for street cleaning around the same time, these reforms ended up being rather short-lived. There just wasn’t enough funding to make the improvements necessary. It’s also important to note that neighborhoods that were lower income, largely immigrant communities in Lower Manhattan, were experiencing the worst of the worst in terms of sanitation. The system of sanitation that New York City had was stratified by class, creating social connotations around immigrants and the unthinkable conditions they lived in. Wealthier residents had the means to hire private contractors to maintain the streets outside their homes, whereas poor, overcrowded communities were at the mercy of the underfunded public street cleaning services that were frankly not up to the task and frequently refused to even venture into the filthiest neighborhoods anyways (Meyers & Young, 2019, 11:30). When waste was picked up off the street, much of it was taken to “dumping piers” – barge-like vessels in the East River – where men, women and child scavengers, who came to be known as “rag and bone men”, made careers out of picking through the massive piles of trash for things that could be useful or had resale value, and selling them around the city as traveling merchants. After the dumping piers had been picked through, they were charted out into the Atlantic Ocean where their contents were dumped. This was not technically legal, but there weren’t measures in place to enforce an alternative (Meyers & Young, 2019, 13:00).
This particular methodology of trash disposal started to become a visible issue in the 1880’s, as New York City was experiencing a huge building boom that was creating massive amounts of debris. Massive chunks of material that had been dumped into the Atlantic Ocean started to resurface and wash up onto the shores of New York and New Jersey. This became such an issue that ships began to have trouble navigating past Sandy Hook, a narrow peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic from Northern New Jersey towards Brooklyn, during low tide. Once ocean dumping started to have an effect on the shipping industry and impeded general access to the Port of New York, the Federal government set up two official dumping sites located a few miles offshore. Yet, the illegal dumping continued. Throughout the 1800’s, 75% of the waste produced in New York City was abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean (Meyers & Young, 2019, 13:30).
At the end of the 19th century, change in New York City’s waste management procedures were finally afoot. Up until this time, trash and human waste are treated essentially the same way with respect to their disposal. In 1881, the New York City Department of Street Cleaning was created, absorbing waste management responsibility from the NYPD, in response to public outcry over filthy, polluted streets and chaotic, inconsistent garbage collection (Weill Cornell Medicine, 2021). The official task of the organization was, “to keep all of our streets, avenues, lanes, and alleys thoroughly clean, and remove all the new fallen snow form the principal thoroughfares,” (Meyers & Young, 2019, 14:30). However, the agency did not prove very affective for their first decade of existence due to continued corruption in City government. By 1895, a sea change was afoot in New York City politics; residents had had enough mismanagement and corruption, and craved reliability and reform.
That year, a new Mayor was elected by the name of William Strong, who ran on a platform of cleaning up the city, both symbolically and literally. In an effort to live up to this campaign promise, William Strong appointed a man named George Waring, a Civil War Colonel turned sanitary engineer from Missouri, to be the Commissioner of the department. Waring’s post-Civil War experience conducting urban drainage and sewage projects throughout the United States – including working on the drainage system for New York City’s Central Park – made him the perfect candidate for the job. George Waring brought a military rigor to his position with the New York City Department of Street Cleaning, in addition to his experience as a creative sanitary engineer in different contexts (Meyers & Young, 2019, 18:12). Immediately upon his appointment, Waring promptly instituted the City’s first real strategic waste management plan, which forbade ocean dumping (although this practice continued for decades) and made recycling mandatory. This new recycling law was enforced by the New York City Police Department, under the direction of its then-Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. (Weill Cornell Medicine, 2021). Household trash was partitioned into three different classifications: rubbish, ash, and food waste. The first category, rubbish, constituted largely paper and other in-demand materials that could be salvaged and resold. Ash, the second category, was sent to landfill at Rikers Island, in the East River between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, along with the rubbish that couldn’t be resold. Food waste went through a process of steaming/boiling and compression for the eventual rendering into fertilizer and grease/oil, which was used in part to make soap products. The processing of food waste happened at a facility on an island in Jamaica Bay called Barren Island, where the water pollution and rancid smell emitted from the waste processing earned the waters off the shore of Barren Island the nickname Dead Horse Bay. On hot days, the vile smell wafted all the way to the Rockaways, frequently ruining and otherwise pleasant beach day (Meyers & Young, 2019, 22:00).
George Waring’s appointment to the New York City Department of Street Cleaning is emblematic of an era of progressivism that followed an era of extreme corruption in city government in New York, and things were starting to get done (Meyers & Young, 2019, 4:40). A physical manifestation of this transition were the new, all-white uniforms street cleaners were required to wear – at the behest of Waring himself. At the time, it was very uncommon for people to wear all white outside of the medical field, but Waring wanted his workers, sometimes referred to as Waring’s White Angels, because of their uniforms, to represent a symbolic sort of purity of the department. Additionally, he wanted the uniforms to be easily identifiable to prevent workers from dilly-dallying on the job – perhaps going to the saloon – instead of diligently cleaning the streets of the city. This ethos of the department attracted a very different kind of worker than in years past. Prior to Waring’s addition to city government, and even prior to the existence of the Department of Street Cleaning itself, street cleaning jobs were seen as the easiest jobs to attain, frequently given as a handout by corrupt officials to men who saw the title as a free paycheck. The new fleet of street cleaners in white uniforms constituted 200 men and were formally called “soldiers of the public”. Their work was a great success, especially compared to the former status quo, even to the extent that parades were often thrown in their honor (Meyers & Young, 2019, 19:34).
Waring’s street cleaners, outfitted with their white uniforms, square shovels and brooms, took to the streets of the city with horse-drawn wagons – constructed from wood with large pegged-wheels. Trash that was left on the side of the street, sometimes overflowing onto the sidewalks, was swept into tidier piles, scooped up and dumped onto the horse-drawn wagons. This was also the first time that trash bins were placed on sidewalks for the public to use in sorting their garbage. The cans, made from metal, were marked with messages like “HELP KEEP THE STREET CLEAR” and “OBEY THE LAW, USE THIS CAN”. There were cans for ‘fruit skins’ and cans for ‘paper’, essentially separating wet trash from dry trash (Sanitation Foundation, 2020).
In 1898, this street cleaning program expanded into all of the boroughs beyond Manhattan (Meyers & Young, 2019, 20:15). Unfortunately, and rather ironically, George Waring died of yellow fever this same year, and the subsequent commissioners for the New York City Department of Street Cleaning didn’t maintain the same level of commitment or precision that Waring brought to the job. Many of the programs he initiated continued, but effectively deteriorated under other, less dedicated leaders (Meyers & Young, 2019, 23:15).
The significant change in approach brought about by Waring initiated a substantial change to the public sphere in New York City, which coincided with the prevalence of the City Beautiful movement. Prior to industrialization and urbanization, the wealthy had no reason to have any conception of the daily trials and tribulations of the working poor, let alone interact with them. Industrial cities of the late 1800s, New York included, were plagued with extreme poverty, overcrowding, crime, and disease, experienced acutely by working class people. However, the slums were isolated enough from the middle- and upper-class societies of the time, that their description and illustration in works like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, shocked them into action. It’s widely understood that poverty was the central condition that dominoed into rancid, violent living environments that people were unable to escape from, and were only further exacerbated by inept or corrupt local governments. Faced year after year with the ineptitude of their ruling bodies despite the plight of working-class slums, certain groups within the working class themselves began to lash out in bursts of violence. Industrialization and urbanization forced contact between the lower and upper classes, bringing to the consciousness of each how much better or worse off they could be. Once awareness was raised in the upper class, a movement grew to improve the living conditions in industrial cities, particularly in the United States and the UK. Based on these observations, thinkers and planners of the times concluded that the physical appearance of a neighborhood – its general cleanliness, the quality of its public spaces (parks and boulevards), and the ornateness of its architecture – was directly linked to moral purity, civic loyalty, and harmonious moral order. This concept is the central tenet of the City Beautiful movement, which was starting to guide the decision making of city governments – namely policy makers and planners (Hall, 2016). In New York City specifically, the efforts of dedicated public servants like George Waring made massive improvements to the safety and cleanliness of the public realm, creating a decontaminated slate for the building boom to continue (Meyers & Young, 2019, 22:19).
Additionally, 1895 was the year the country’s first ever permanent incinerator was built on Governors Island in the New York Harbor. At the time, Governors Island was shifting from military uses related to the Revolutionary War to serving a more administrative purpose for the City. Over the next century, incinerators would serve a massive role in New York’s waste management system, responsible for disposing of about one third of all of the city’s trash (Miller, 2000).
1900’s:
In the early 1900’s, motor vehicles started to be used for trash collection and removal, and the trucks went through years of redesign and upgrading in order to better serve the specific purpose of trash collection. Earlier models had fully open tops and cracks in the truck body where ash would seep out. Later models had hydraulic mechanisms to lift the bed of the truck for easier disposal at trash dumping sites. Motorized vehicles greatly improved the efficiency of street cleaners as they became the standard for trash collection (Commendatore, 2018).
By the 1920’s New York’s post-Waring Department of Street Cleaning had seen better days, and the condition of city streets were deteriorating yet again. This was exacerbated by population growth, and the City had to get creative with how they were to continue to manage the trash tonnage. In fact, in the decade that followed WWI, the amount of solid waste produced by New York City increased by 70% (Kaiser-Schatzlein, 2021).
The City ultimately turned to fire for their exacerbating waste issue, and incineration really took over as one of the primary methods of waste management. In addition to the massive facility on Governors Island, many apartment buildings had their own basement incinerators. Building residents would separate their garbage and toss what could be burned down to the basement for its eventual fiery demise. Not all buildings had their own incinerators, however, so the option remained for residences to bring their garbage – or have it picked up – and brought to an ash dump, which would incinerate garbage into indiscernible particles through a process that belched dark clouds of smoke into the sky. One of the largest, most notorious of which was the Corona Ash Dump in Queens, which was operated by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, a private firm. The heap of ashes produced at the Corona Ash Dump grew to be 90 feet tall at one point and was thusly dubbed ‘Mount Corona’. It was Robert Moses’ idea in the 1920’s to build a park atop the ash heap in Corona, Queens, as part of his concept to build a network of parks across the city. After almost 30 years of infill, in which about 50 million cubic yards of ash and waste were dumped onto the site, the site was selected to host the 1939 World’s Fair, and Moses’ Flushing-Meadows Park was subsequently constructed (Meyers & Young, 2019, 24:12).
There were many publicly owned trash incineration sites operating during this time as well. A set of incinerators on Rikers Island burned all day and through the night, long before there were any prison facilities on the island. In fact, Rikers Island itself was physically expanded through the infill of ash brought from other incineration sites by prison labor. In the year 1937, the number of incinerators operating at once in New York City peaked at twenty-one different plants. During and after WWII however, the city shifted away from incineration as such a dominant form of waste management (Meyers & Young, 2019, 25:26).
Not to be outdone, ocean dumping also ramped up in the 1920’s. The City purchased twelve additional garbage scows in 1922 to add to the seven it already owned and operated in order to keep up with the demand. At this point, dumping was used for trash items that would most quickly decompose at sea – largely food waste. Unfortunately, even food waste wasn’t decomposing fast enough to avoid being washed up onto the city’s beaches to rot. Eventually, the problem became so putrid and unsightly that the courts ruled against the City, forbidding any further ocean dumping, and giving the City until 1934 to conjure a different locale to dump its trash. Rikers Island, which had previously also served as an official dumping ground for trash, was running out of space. Additionally, the dump at Rikers Island had caught the attention of Robert Moses, who didn’t want the looming mound of garbage visible from his pristine, futuristic 1939 World’s Fair vision across the river. Garbage landfills proved a hinderance to Robert Moses’ vision in another capacity, as many of New York City’s dumps existed along the waterfront, preventing the picturesque vision of parks and beaches Moses’ was determined to achieve for the city’s future (Meyers & Young, 2019, 29:12).
The situation stayed status quo through WWII, and the city’s existing dumping sites and ash mounds continue to grow. Immediately after WWII, very few landfills, including Edgemere Landfill which opened in 1938, had remaining space left for additional garbage. The city still continued to expand and increase in density of population, and it became clear this problem was not going away. New York City’s massive, reeking network of waste management facilities was so unsightly that even newly developing neighborhoods in close enough proximity were seeing decreasing property values because of it. By around 1945, it became clear that New Yorkers were living too close to their garbage, and something had to give (Meyers & Young, 2019, 30:24).
Robert Moses, dedicated to finding a solution to this unsightly waste management issue, turned his attention to Staten Island. Staten Island at this time was populated to an extent, but still maintained much more untouched land than the other boroughs. Moses proposed that the City utilize the swampy, Southwestern portion of the island as a temporary dump, only to be utilized for three years while a more permanent solution could be devised. The residents of Staten Island were immediately opposed to the proposal, even to the extent that a movement to secede from New York City began to burgeon up, with the Fresh Kills Landfill as a central issue. Despite sustained opposition from residents, Robert Moses was able to sway the Staten Island Borough President at the time, brokering an exchange for the construction of an expressway, the West Shore Expressway on Staten Island’s Western edge. In 1948, the Fresh Kills Landfill was opened in Staten Island, and all of the city’s trash – garbage and ash alike - was dumped there in layers. By 1955, only seven years after its inception, Fresh Kills Landfill had became the largest landfill in the world, covering 2,200 acres of land.
In 1957, the City authorized private contractors for waste disposal, relinquishing some of the burden of the process. In the 1960’s, a series of federal laws were passed, including the Clear Air Act of 1963, that mandated cleaner practices in urban environments. Championed by Mayor John Lindsay, in office from 1966 to 1973, New York City began to implement more environmentally friendly practices, which included closing all of the City’s publicly owned trash incinerators for good. This decision ushered in an era of cleaner air for New Yorkers but meant all of the city’s garbage was headed to Fresh Kills Landfill. A 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that it was not a violation of the Interstate Commerce Laws to transport waste from one state to another, and New York City began shipping its waste beyond the city limits. In 1994, the last public incinerator in New York City was closed due to environmental concerns, and by the late 1990’s, Fresh Kills was the only landfill in the city that was still operational. By 2001, Fresh Kills Landfill was officially closed, despite a brief reopening to receive debris in the aftermath of 9/11. At this point, 100% of New York City’s trash was taken on barges to be landfilled in other states, which remains the case today.
Present Day:
Despite the vast evolution of trash disposal tactics throughout New York City’s history – from street dumping, to ocean dumping, to incineration, to landfill – the actual process by which the City picks up and removes trash from the doorsteps of its residents hasn’t changed much since the late 1800’s. The system that requires businesses, individuals, and building managers place massive heaps of trash on the sidewalk to be removed certain days of the week is almost unchanged since the days of George Waring’s Department of Street Cleaning. The largest difference, in fact, is the introduction of the plastic bag – now required for placing trash in before it’s moved to the sidewalk. Although the conditions of New York’s streets – and thusly its public realm – have vastly improved since the days dead animals were left to rot on the sidewalk for months, this system of solid waste management is massively antiquated. It was hardly suited for the New York of the 1900’s, and it’s massively outdated, uncreative, and insufficient for the 2020’s. New Yorkers are no longer getting yellow fever and cholera, but the current system of trash removal exacerbates the presence of pests and general lack of sanitation of the public realm, as it had historically. City officials are not critical enough of the damage the current system does to public health and the quality of the city’s public spaces. Even the ‘waste management’ sections of many comprehensive plans released by recent Mayors focus only on reducing waste production itself, beefing up recycling efforts, and diversion from landfills (Rep. City of New York, 2011). The Covid-19 pandemic shifted public sentiment and bolstered awareness around the irreplicable value of public space, and rotating heaps of trash crowding public space at weekly intervals prevents the introduction of both ad-hoc and permanent alternate uses to our streets and sidewalks. New York City has had an incalculable garbage problem since its inception; a problem which has never truly been solved. The city deserves a new, innovative trash collection system that allows the public’s full use of its public realm today and for future generations to come.
Bloomberg, M., PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York (2011). New York; The City of New York.
Commendatore, C. (2018, November 14). Then and Now: A Look at How the Garbage Truck has Evolved. Waste360. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://www.waste360.com/trucks/then-and-now-look-how-garbage-truck-has-evolved
Hall, P. (2014). Cities of tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in Since 1880 (Vol. 4). John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Kaiser-Schatzlein, R. (2021, April 23). The History of New York, Told Through its Trash. The New Yorker. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-history-of-new-york-told-through-its-trash
Meyers, T & Young, G. (Hosts). (2019, August 9). Talking Trash: A History of New York City Sanitation (No. 296) [Audio podcast episode]. In Bowery Boys. https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2019/08/talking-trash-a-history-of-new-york-city-sanitation.html
Sanitation Foundation. (2020). Dsny Classroom Series: Nyc Sanitation History. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_z81Y7qA2I&ab_channel=SanitationFoundation.
Tarnowsky, T. (2021). Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park. Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://parks.ny.gov/parks/oldcrotonaqueduct/details.aspx
Walsh, K., & Kadinsky, S. (2011, October 14). Collect Pond. Forgotten New York. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://forgotten-ny.com/2011/10/collect-pond/
Weil Cornell Medicine. (2021). A Brief History of New York City Recycling. Sustainability. Retrieved December 19, 2021, from https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/brief-history-new-york-city-recycling