Colorful framed prints. Large pieces of expensive fabric. Office supplies. A lovely modern desk chair.
These are just a few of the things Joanne O’Connor, a special events planner, has picked up on Madison Avenue – but not at the places you might think.
You see, ”shopping,” for O’Connor, means sorting through the garbage receptacles situated on 45th Street, near the Conde Nast Building on Madison Avenue – a venue that houses some of Manhattan’s most extravagant consumers.
”I don’t consider this stuff trash,” explains O’Connor, 39. ”It’s just things people can’t use anymore. I mean, I’ve seen people come by here in limousines to trash-pick.”
O’Connor knows it’s odd for an attractive, smartly dressed woman with a good job to be foraging through garbage bins on highly trafficked public walkways. For that reason, she didn’t want her photograph to be taken by The Post. But, she insists, she’s not embarrassed to be a trash picker – or a ”Dumpster diver,” as some sidewalk ”shoppers” prefer to call their hobby of culling cool clothes, furniture and whatnot from public garbage bins.
In fact, thousands of New Yorkers make a habit of snatching the stuff they find abandoned along city streets or disposed of in garbage bins between visits by trash carters.
If you had rounded the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue last week you’d have tripped over a wicker daybed, only slightly ratty, abandoned on the sidewalk. On Tuesday, if you were walking through Cooper Square, you would have come upon a Dumpster overflowing with perfectly good music how-to books discarded by Carl Fischer Inc., a music publishing company.
That same night, the aforementioned bins outside Conde Nast were brimming with current issues of glossy magazines, as well as reams of various publications’ letterhead stationery, pristine ink pads and notebooks; there were also several perfectly good desk files. (A man we ran into while foraging through the bins begged us not to reveal the spot in print: He was a regular who wanted to keep the location a secret.)
Contrary to expectation, the trash-obsessed are not impoverished desperadoes. They are well-heeled, upstanding citizens who simply find little excitement in shopping in large, organized department stores where the cookie-cutter stock is always predictable.
For instance, instead of decorating the nightclub he opened in the mid-1980s with store-bought furniture, one Manhattan-based physician, who asked not to be named, furnished it entirely from things he and his partners had found in the trash.
”I would drive my Chevy pickup truck around and pick up anything I saw that was interesting,” says the doctor, 37. Chairs, tables, artwork, and lamps were all fair game – as were electronics.
”We had a wall of TVs that all came from the trash. Some of them were in fine condition, but whether they worked or not didn’t matter – we’d just put them up on the wall anyway.”
Even now, the wealthy physician and his wife are still prone to sticking their noses into trash cans. Why? It’s fun, they say, and in their hip, downtown neighborhood, the refuse is particularly good.
Since the ’80s art boom, SoHo yields terrific trash – especially at the end of the month, when apartments change hands or exhibits come down. However, edgier dressers and decorators choose to pick in the East Village, where one devoted trash-can sifter reports having found an etched-glass jewelry box she believes was made in the ’40s, a bamboo side table and a dozen or so highly collectible teeny-bopper magazines circa 1958, featuring a young, slim Elvis Presley.
And when she’s not picking off Madison, O’Connor loves to cruise her posh Park Avenue neighborhood for garbage goodies, which tend to be small antiques and home accessories. (She also keeps an eye on movie sets that are closing down, where she’s spotted French doors and cool period furniture that a set dresser must have been too tired to tote away.)
But trash-pickers do face one problem. According to a spokeswoman from the Department of Sanitation, once trash hits the sidewalk, it technically belongs to the city. However, she says you probably won’t be arrested for dragging a mirror out of a garbage pail (thankfully, the NYPD is busy with things other than arresting Dumpster divers). What you may get are some odd looks from passersby who don’t know the treasures to be found in Oscar-the-Grouch territory.
For this reason, Patrick Cunningham, an art director for an advertising company, says he makes it a point to do his picking incognito, and in the dark. (Although, he points out, foraging in the dark can mean that you miss seeing things such as nails, ”gross gooey stuff” and the occasional rat.)
Cunningham says his best booty has been found in front of recently vacated or renovated storefronts. His best score? Vintage signage found abandoned near Wall Street that would go for big bucks if it were on sale in one of Lafayette Street’s cool home-interior boutiques.
Fellow sifter Randall Makiej, 29, art director for the theatrical troupe Blue Man Group on Lafayette Street, explains: ”This is an extremely wealthy city where people are constantly buying new things but have limited space in which to keep them.” He turned the syndrome to his advantage by furnishing his 3,000-foot SoHo loft with trash.
Illustrator Katherine Streeter, 29, has been late for several important appointments because of her penchant for picking up items left at the curbside. Streeter has found her best pickings near schools, where she’s scored chairs, desks and odd office equipment. Sometimes, though, you don’t get to choose the things you find: They choose you.
Once, while living in the East Village and working as a writer, O’Connor received an assignment to write a short play. She was totally uninspired until she stepped out of her 11th Street apartment and saw an Underwood typewriter sitting atop a covered garbage can.
”It was in perfect, mint condition,” she remembers. ”I thought, ‘This is a sign: It’s been sent to me.”’