We got a Times piece today!! Robin - this is a fabulous picture of you! Congrats everyone!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/nyregion/15nyc.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin
Robin Nagle, an anthropologist at New York University, among the trucks she likes to praise.
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Collecting the Trash: Its Science and Value
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 15, 2008
The city employees who sweep your streets and collect your garbage? You know them as sanitation workers. But think of them also as “folk sociologists,” Robin Nagle says. She’s serious.
“They can give you a demographic and sort of a sociological and anthropological interpretation of a given block or a given section of the city that’s remarkably detailed,” said Dr. Nagle, who teaches at New York University. “Accurate? I don’t know. But I would bet my boots it’s pretty spot on.”
By vocation, Dr. Nagle is an anthropologist. By inclination, you could consider her also a trashologist. Should that word ever come into being, she’d qualify for it as much as anyone.
She has long been fascinated by the stuff that people throw away, and even more so by the men — there are women, but men are more the norm — whose lot in life is to haul it away. In 2006, the city’s Sanitation Department went so far as to name her its anthropologist-in-residence, an unpaid position that enables her to study at close range a group of workers she believes are absurdly underappreciated.
No question, the 7,775 rank-and-file men and women on the Sanitation Department’s payroll are collectively the Rodney Dangerfield of the city’s uniformed forces. The tabloids are practically incapable of typing the words “firefighter” and “police officer” without tacking “hero” alongside. Not so with sanitation workers, though theirs is an arduous and potentially hazardous assignment, day in and day out.
When a cop or a firefighter dies on the job, the city drapes itself in black. When a sanitation worker loses his life — and it happens more often than you may realize — the death tends to migrate quickly toward the back pages.
“I’m not saying that we should take away anything from Police or Fire,” Dr. Nagle said, “but let’s share the love a little bit.”
Even among themselves, sanitation workers have an image problem.
“One of my central questions,” Dr. Nagle said, “is what is it like to wear a uniform and do a job that is basically stigmatized to the point where I know many men — not so much the women, but the men — who won’t let their neighbors know what they do for a living. When pressed, they’ll say they ‘work for the city.’ ”
Plain and simple, she says, sanitation workers deserve more respect. She is convinced, as is the department, that one solution would be a sanitation museum.
New York doesn’t have one, and that is startling when you think about it. We have museums dedicated to the police, to firefighters, to mass transit, to various ethnicities, to skyscrapers, even to sex. But oddly, there is nothing devoted to sanitation, though we cannot live without it. It’s plainly more important than sex.
(No way, you say? Then try this simple test. Can you get through the day without having sex? O.K., now ask yourself if you can get through the day without having to toss something into the garbage. We rest our case.)
To plant the seed of a future museum, Dr. Nagle and an N.Y.U. colleague, Haidy Geismar, put together a monthlong exhibition on the history and importance of the Sanitation Department. The department provided space in a warren of offices that it has on West 20th Street.
THE show, which closed on Sunday, included photographs and equipment, old uniforms, posters describing sanitation’s role in city life and a smattering of mongo — sanit-talk for objects that were tossed onto the rubbish heap but were deemed worth rescuing by trash collectors.
On the exhibition’s final weekend, Dr. Nagle gave lectures on the department’s evolution and the city’s smelly past. “It’s difficult,” she said, “to convey the ripeness, the stench, of New York through most of its history.” Just as well.
As for a museum, it won’t materialize right away, she and Dr. Geismar said the other night in response to questions from an audience of 60 or so. There are financial and political obstacles. Within the department itself, Dr. Nagle said in an interview, not everyone has been good at “lifting their eyes to the horizon and thinking about something longer-term.” But a museum, she predicted, will rise some day.
Without an effective sanitation force, New York would not be the great city it is, she said, but that basic fact is easily overlooked if the streets are swept and the trash is picked up.
“One of the side effects of doing the job well,” Dr. Nagle said, “is that it creates its own invisibility.”
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
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