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As N.Y.C. Trash Problem Mounts, Garbage Will Be Picked Up on Labor Day

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As N.Y.C. Trash Problem Mounts, Garbage Will Be Picked Up on Labor Day

Labor Day weekend is usually about seashore journeys and cookouts, the air tinged with the scent of sunscreen and barbecue. However on the olfactory flip aspect, one other custom follows: scorching, putrid mountains of trash.

With no residential rubbish assortment on Sunday or Monday, the inevitable three-day-weekend trash pileups have spawned a post-Labor Day ritual amongst New York Metropolis’s sanitation staff. It’s often called the “vacation chase” — the place further staff are placed on assortment routes till the weekend’s amassed refuse is lastly gathered.

However this Labor Day, the Sanitation Division will strive one thing new.

For the primary time in current reminiscence, town will schedule residential trash assortment on the vacation, utilizing a pool of Sanitation Division volunteers.

The transfer is born of political crucial: By means of Aug. 28, town’s nonemergency 311 assist line had acquired 25,754 complaints about trash dirtying sidewalks and streets, up 23 p.c from 2021 and greater than double than throughout the identical interval in 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing.

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Mayor Eric Adams has vowed to sort out the issue head-on. The funds he negotiated with the New York Metropolis Council put $22 million towards emptying nook litter baskets extra typically, $7.5 million towards focusing on recognized litter drawback spots and $4.5 million towards cleansing vacant tons. The town has lately begun experimenting with trash containerization, a apply already in use in different international locations. The mayor has resurrected twice-a-week road cleansing in lots of neighborhoods.

Mr. Adams has additionally made a degree of publicly focusing on deserted eating sheds, which may act as repositories for litter and illicit exercise, even donning a tough hat and wielding a sledgehammer to assist tear one down earlier in August.

“Individuals are uninterested in the trash, they’re uninterested in the rats, they’re uninterested in the deserted out of doors eating sheds, and so they simply don’t need the rubbish round it,” Mr. Adams stated on the time.

Because the further litter basket funding went into impact July 1, complaints about overflowing baskets have fallen greater than 60 p.c, the Sanitation Division says.

However the amount of trash produced on three-day weekends stays a frightening problem, much more daunting than standard-issue Monday piles of rubbish.

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Jessica Tisch, town’s new sanitation commissioner, stated the week following the lengthy July 4 weekend had been “unacceptably soiled,” and so is town usually.

“The town is dirtier postpandemic than it was prepandemic,” she stated — a situation she ascribed to funds cuts in sanitation companies throughout essentially the most pressing days of the well being disaster.

On a mean Monday up to now 4 weeks, New York Metropolis sanitation staff picked up about 9,300 tons of trash, in contrast with 7,000 tons on a mean Thursday.

Final Labor Day got here after Hurricane Ida inundated New York Metropolis, interrupting trash assortment. In 2020, sanitation staff hauled almost 12,000 tons of residential trash on the Tuesday after Labor Day. By the next Tuesday, trash assortment returned to regular.

Ms. Tisch is hopeful that this new initiative will probably be cost-neutral, as a result of the additional time beyond regulation bills on Labor Day is perhaps offset by much less time beyond regulation in the course of the week after Labor Day.

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If sufficient trash may be collected to substantively restrict the “vacation chase,” town plans to undertake the same protocol for all Monday federal holidays shifting ahead, supplied there is no such thing as a important snowfall within the forecast.

However it nonetheless stays to be seen if sufficient New Yorkers will put out their trash on Labor Day, and what number of sanitation staff will join the Labor Day shift.

Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Affiliation, stated Ms. Tisch’s experiment is price a strive.

“Hear, I feel it’s good,” he stated. “Why wouldn’t it be dangerous? It’s not dangerous. It’s good. The article is to get the trash off the streets.”

Then once more, Mr. Nespoli stated, he doesn’t know what number of sanitation staff will work on Labor Day. Roughly 6,300 of town’s 10,000 sanitation staff choose up trash. The town is aiming for 800 volunteers to work on Labor Day.

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“These days individuals are pondering in a different way,” Mr. Nespoli stated. “They’re pondering, you realize what, possibly they need extra time with their household.”

Grace Ashford contributed reporting.

New York

How NYC Neighborhoods Voted in the 2025 Mayoral Primary: Map

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How NYC Neighborhoods Voted in the 2025 Mayoral Primary: Map

The candidate leading each neighborhood in the first round

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Zohran Mamdani, an upstart state assemblyman from Queens, was on the brink of winning Tuesday’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. While results were not yet final, Mr. Mamdani leaped ahead of a crowded field thanks to a surge of turnout in gentrifying neighborhoods, and strong support from Asian and Hispanic enclaves.

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Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, also ran up large vote tallies in the affluent brownstone-lined blocks of Brooklyn, in the diverse blocks of Upper Manhattan and in areas with substantial South Asian populations in Queens.

His main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, had hoped to reassemble Mayor Eric Adams’s winning 2021 coalition of Black, Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish voters, but instead lost ground in some of those communities.

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Neighborhoods where Eric Adams won

The areas where the current mayor won in the 2021 Democratic primary are outlined.

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Mr. Mamdani, who campaigned on addressing New York’s affordability crisis, performed stronger than his rivals in areas where a majority of residents are college graduates, as well as in middle-income and higher-income neighborhoods. He won most areas with a majority of Asian residents and was modestly outpacing Mr. Cuomo in majority Hispanic areas.

Mr. Cuomo, 67, had more support in areas with a majority of Black residents and in areas where a majority of residents are low-income. There were some exceptions, most notably Mr. Cuomo’s strong performance on the Upper West and East Sides in Manhattan, where Mr. Mamdani struggled to win over an older, wealthier electorate, which includes a sizable segment of Jewish voters.

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How candidates fared with groups of voters

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Based on results in precincts where each group is a majority.

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Precincts
with…
Andrew
Cuomo
Zohran
Mamdani
Brad
Lander
Higher income residents

24% of precincts

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30% 42% 20%
Middle income residents

49% of precincts

37% 47% 7%
Lower income residents
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24% of precincts

49% 38% 3%
More college graduates

27% of precincts

28% 45% 19%
More white residents

29% of precincts

34% 39% 19%
More Hispanic residents

16% of precincts

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41% 48% 4%
More Black residents

15% of precincts

51% 34% 3%
More Asian residents
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4% of precincts

36% 52% 5%
More renters

70% of precincts

33% 47% 11%

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Mr. Mamdani, who would be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, won the largest vote share in gentrifying neighborhoods like Ridgewood in Queens and Greenpoint in Brooklyn that are home to groups of young, left-leaning voters. Voters in Jamaica Hills, a Queens neighborhood home to a sizable South Asian population, also chose Mr. Mamdani by a large margin.

Mr. Cuomo’s efforts to court the Orthodox Jewish vote paid off. Borough Park and Midwood in Brooklyn were two of his top-performing neighborhoods. He also won large margins in the less dense, coastal communities of Far Rockaway and Bayswater in Queens, far from Manhattan.

Brad Lander, the city comptroller, was in third place overall. The cluster of neighborhoods in Brooklyn where Mr. Lander fared the best — which include Park Slope, Cobble Hill and Windsor Terrace — are all neighborhoods where Mr. Mamdani won most of the votes. That could ultimately benefit Mr. Mamdani under the city’s ranked-choice voting system, because the two men cross-endorsed each other and encouraged their supporters to rank them both.

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The system allowed voters to list up to five candidates on their ballots. If their top choices are eliminated, their votes will be transferred to candidates who are lower on their ballots next Tuesday.

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Each candidate’s top five neighborhoods by vote share

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Zohran Mamdani

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Neighborhood Pct. Votes
Ridgewood, Queens 80% 7,030
Bushwick, Brooklyn 79% 14,164
East Williamsburg, Brooklyn 75% 2,586
Jamaica Hills, Queens 74% 1,458
Greenpoint, Brooklyn 72% 7,583
Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo

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Neighborhood Pct. Votes
Borough Park, Brooklyn 80% 6,577
Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn 76% 236
Midwood, Brooklyn 72% 9,160
Far Rockaway, Queens 72% 2,489
Bayswater, Queens 72% 522
Brad Lander

Brad Lander

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Neighborhood Pct. Votes
Park Slope, Brooklyn 35% 7,330
Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn 34% 1,689
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn 32% 1,199
Columbia St. Waterfront District, Brooklyn 31% 355
South Slope, Brooklyn 30% 632
Adrienne Adams

Adrienne Adams

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Neighborhood Pct. Votes
Springfield Gardens, Queens 17% 891
Laurelton, Queens 16% 506
St. Albans, Queens 15% 828
Jamaica, Queens 14% 1,381
Cambria Heights, Queens 14% 425

Assuming he prevails in the primary, Mr. Mamdani will face a general election in November that has the potential to be unusually competitive. Mr. Adams is seeking a second term, this time as an independent. Curtis Sliwa, a Republican, will be on the ballot, along with Jim Walden, a lawyer and independent. Mr. Cuomo also still has the option to pursue a third-party fall campaign.

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10 Questions With Brad Lander

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10 Questions With Brad Lander

Brad Lander took a risk last summer when he entered the New York City mayor’s race instead of running for a second term as comptroller.

But he was worried then, he says, about the city’s future under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams — and later about the possibility that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would join the race, as he did.

He has run as an earnest technocrat with a stack of progressive plans. But he has not had the same momentum as Zohran Mamdani, who has risen in the polls and received the first-choice endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (She ranked Mr. Lander third.)

Ahead of the June 24 primary, the leading Democrats in the race visited The New York Times for interviews. We are publishing excerpts from those interviews, and this is the sixth in the series; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We asked Mr. Lander, 55, questions about 10 themes, with the occasional follow-up, touching on his management of the city’s finances and the two good things he thinks Mr. Adams has done as mayor.

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We’ve written previously about Mr. Lander’s plan to end street homelessness for people with severe mental illness, his criticism of Mr. Cuomo and how he seriously considered becoming a rabbi.

In that order — affordability, public safety, Trump and then just cleaning up corruption and making the city run better. But I’ll put affordability first. That is what’s pushing people out of New York.

The best New York City mayor ever was Fiorello La Guardia, and he was not in my lifetime. Alas, I wish he had been.

The mayors in my lifetime have done great things, but I hesitate to say which one. If you want the mayor who managed the city best — picked up the garbage, made the city function well — Mike Bloomberg certainly did that the best. But the gap in seeing how much income inequality was growing, and stop and frisk, were real.

The best single accomplishment of any mayor is universal prekindergarten, which has been incredible and life-changing for a lot of families, but there were a lot of other issues in the de Blasio administration.

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Yes.

I’m pleased to say I’m open to admitting when I get things wrong.

We did some research on Hudson Yards. I had put some things out when I was the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development that I thought the city was going to get screwed, basically, and not benefit financially. I thought it was all for the developer.

My team in the comptroller’s office did some research, then came to the office and showed me: We’re making between $200 million and $300 million a year. We published it. I put a cover note on that said: “I got this wrong. The research says this is actually working for New York City.”

I live on 13th Street in Park Slope.

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Our mortgage is $3,300 a month.

We do own a car.

We have a Toyota Prius.

I take the subway or bus a couple of times a week.

My mom was a public elementary school guidance counselor. My dad was a legal services lawyer and then a private-sector lawyer. We grew up middle-class.

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I would say we, my wife and I, are upper-middle-class. We made the very fortunate decision to buy a co-op in brownstone Brooklyn for $125,000 in 1996, and that is why we’ve been able to raise our family. We sold it, and then bought our rowhouse on 13th Street, and that has enabled us to live in a neighborhood that we couldn’t afford now, if we hadn’t bought then.

I mean, Eric Adams lies every day and twice on Tuesdays — probably more than that, honestly.

Investments in Israel have grown on my watch, so it’s just a lie. And our pension performance — you can look at it. We’re actually the first to publish it online. They’re right out there for everyone to see.

I do my job. The job of city comptroller, in addition to managing those pension funds well, is oversight of the mayor — is to be a watchdog, and I have been a good watchdog.

We worked to cancel that $432 million DocGo contract. [Mr. Lander criticized the city’s decision in 2023 to grant DocGo, a medical services company, a no-bid contract to help care for an influx of migrants.] Our audits have been hard-hitting in all kinds of places.

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I went early on to him and said: “Let’s find some things to work together on. Let’s try to have a strategy for what to do when it’s my job to say ‘This contract stinks’ or ‘This agency isn’t getting its job done.’”

And he smiled, like he does, but not one time have they been willing to work with us to fix something that’s broken.

I’ll give him two.

NYC Reads — the focus on literacy, phonics education, kids with dyslexia. A lot more to do there. There’s only two of those structured literacy schools. I think there should be one in every district, but it’s a good start.

And trash containerization. It shouldn’t have taken us so long to put lids on the trash cans. There’s a long way to go there as well. And probably Jessie Tisch gets more credit than Eric. But a big part of the job of mayor is hiring good people. He has hired a lot of bad people, but he’s hired some good people as well.

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There’s going to be a couple of big mayoral priorities that I’m going to deliver — ending street homelessness, building a lot of affordable housing, expanding child care and after-school — and then my commissioners and deputy mayors are going to do a whole bunch of great things we haven’t thought about yet. That’s what happens when you hire really good people and have their backs.

My bagel order is an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, a slice of tomato and lox.

Not toasted.

We’re watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”

Should I pick something that people have heard of? The thing I’ve seen that people should watch is the “Station Eleven” mini-series on HBO. That is like the best thing ever on television. “Watchmen” is a close second.

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Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.

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Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

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Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season?

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