Garbage trucks lining up to enter the East 91st Street waste station, looking south down York Avenue. The facility opened in 1940, and closed in 1998. (WNYC/Amy Eddings)

NEW YORK, NY June 02, 2005 —Everyone creates garbage, but only a few people have to handle it. And that’s especially true for Manhattan. Its residents generate three thousand tons of trash a day….garbage that gets sent for processing to places like Newark, Jersey City, the South Bronx and Williamsburg.

Mayor Bloomberg says his latest plan will promote borough equity by re-building and re-opening a waste transfer station on the Upper East Side. It’s just one part of a big, ambitious plan to pack the city’s garbage into containers, barge it to railroad sites, and send it by train to distant landfills.

But the fight to stop the East 91st Street site, in Speaker Gifford Miller’s district, has overshadowed everything else about the plan.

REPORTER: Tony Ard moved to an apartment on York Avenue, on the Upper East Side, in 2001 -- three years after the marine waste transfer station just two blocks away had been closed.

ARD: For all I knew a marine transfer station meant there was a place for Marines to embark on their expeditions. I had no idea what it was.

REPORTER: He quickly found out. He learned from neighbors that, when it was active, the East 91st Street marine waste transfer station meant garbage trucks lining up along York Avenue. It meant nauseating smells wafting over the neighborhood. Tony Ard formed Gracie Point Community Council, signed up nearly five thousand members, and hired a prominent environmental attorney, and a publicist.

ARD: Garbage dumps -- and that’s what this is, it’s not a marine transfer station, it’s a garbage dump. -- garbage dumps should not be in any residential neighborhood where people live, where there are parks where people play, where there are large populations of children and older adults.

REPORTER: There used to be fewer people around here. In 1940, when the marine waste transfer station opened, this was an industrial area. A city asphalt plant opened right next door, in 1944. But that plant shut down more than thirty years ago. And, with the closure of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, the Upper East Side has seen the end of the East 91st Street transfer station, too. Garbage battles are increasingly been waged in low-income and minority communities, where the vast majority of the city’s residential and commercial waste now goes. Under the mayor’s plan, East 91st Street would take Upper East Side residential trash, and some commercial trash, and supporters say it would start to balance the scales of environmental justice. But Tony Ard points to two public housing projects just a block away.

ARD: This project has 2,200 people living in it. 43% Spanish speaking, 27% African American, and 7 percent are Asian.. I’m saying this because there is a steerotype that’s applied to people who live this area, and that is, they’re white, upper income people. This neighborhood is much more diverse than what this stereotype suggests.

REPORTER: And there’s that old asphalt plant. It now holds Asphalt Green, a community recreation center that opened 12 years ago.

PAUL WEISS: We have a somewhat unique situation in which the driveway for the garbage trucks actually bisects our campus.

Paul Weiss is Asphalt Green’s senior program director. While city officials have promised state-of-the-art odor control devices, and less trucks lining up on York Avenue, Weiss is skeptical. He says a re-opened waste transfer station next door could deeply affect Asphalt Green’s cash cow, its summer camp, which serves 600 kids, and helps finance community outreach programs in East Harlem.

WEISS: Just imagine, the dog days of summer, with all the heat and then combine that with the diseal fuel and the smell of garbage and the compaction of the facility. So I think these are real issues. There is a real sensitivity to how this is going to affect our programs, our uses, and our ability to outreach in a way that makes us attractive.

REPORTER: The residential density of the neighborhood….the proximity to a park…the racially diverse population that would bear the brunt of the stink…These arguments often fall on deaf ears.

EDDIE BAUTISTA: In fact, here’s a community leader from the Federation of Civic Associations of Southeast Queens….

REPORTER: That’s Eddie Bautista, with OWN, the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods, which advised Mayor Bloomberg on his garbage plan. At City Hall, outside the council chambers during a hearing last February, Bautista “interviewed” Crystal Ervin for several reporters about the private transfer station in her neighborhood.

BAUTISTA: And where’s the Regal Transfer Station, is it across the street from what? ERVIN: Oh, let me see, I think it’s less than 80 paces across the street from a park.
BAUTISTA: A park? Oh, I see. Are there senior citizens nearby?
ERVIN: That park is undergoing a million dollar renovation currently, with their track. And we bring a lot of kids in during the summer, because of the pool.
BAUTISTA: Oh, I see.

REPORTER: While Upper East Siders try to blunt criticism that it’s a rich, white community, that wants to avoid shouldering its share of the city’s garbage, supporters of the mayor’s plan are trying to drive that image home. OWN provides reporters with a demographic analysis of the Upper East Side, contrasting it to the South Bronx and Southeast Williamsburg, two communities with 29 waste transfer stations between them.

The East 91st Street fight is also sparking borough tensions. At a hearing in Brooklyn earlier this year, Borough President Marty Markowitz had this to say about Manhattanites.

MARKOWITZ: You know, it’s just too bad. They’re going to have to recognize that they’re not exempt, that their garbage doesn’t smell any better than ours (applause) and they’re gonna have to share in this responsibility, every borough has to share.

REPORTER: But Manhattan may end up sharing differently than others. The East 91st Street site is in Council Speaker Gifford Miller’s district. Miller, a Democratic mayoral candidate, has denounced the East 91st Street re-opening as political gamesmenship by Bloomberg. Councilman Michael McMahon, head of the Sanitation Committee, has also said East 91st appears political. At a hearing in February, he questioned Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty.

MCMAHON: Are you still willing to entertain alternative site proposals in Manhattan?

DOHERTY: you know that’s a difficult question to answer, in some ways, because we talk about getting a plan done and getting it done quickly. Are we looking to get it done, or are we looking to stall it and look and look and look. I mean looking takes a long time. We all know, I see it when I go to site a garage someplace, never mind a transfer station. As soon as you pick the neighborhood, the banners come up: “Go someplace else please.” So it is a problem, and we gotta face that. No matter where we go, there are issues that have to be addressed.

MCMAHON: No I appreciate that but I wanna…I think we can do better, and I think we can pick something in Manhattan that (applause) is realistic.

REPORTER: Gifford Miller’s staff is proposing two alternatives: First, take the Upper East Side’s residential trash to the waste transfer station at West 59th. The mayor wants to use West 59th solely for commercial waste, though, and supporters of his plan say losing any capacity for it there will mean less trucks taken off the streets in the other boroughs. Miller is also suggesting building a facility at the site of the city tow pound on Pier 76, at West 38th Street. Supporters of the mayor’s plan aren’t ruling that out….but they point out that, since it’s located in the Hudson River Park, it could face just as much opposition as East 91st Street. Armed with this information, and strong lobbying from all sides, councilmembers will make a decision on East 91st Street next Wednesday.