When Something Needs Doing on the UWS, We Get It Done

Story was updated Saturday, December 13 at 11:15 a.m.

By Yvonne Vávra

You know how sometimes you fix one thing and accidentally break another? Take the city’s new garbage rules: trash now goes in containers instead of bags on the curb, which is excellent news for anyone who doesn’t enjoy watching rats get the zoomies over their nightly prix fixe. But in the shuffle toward cleanliness, the city also banned anyone outside the Department of Sanitation from bagging trash unless they follow specific guidelines, among which include owning approved containers.

Which is how, in part, one beloved Upper West Side volunteer group found itself sidelined from the very streets it was keeping clean, according to its founder Ann Cutbill Lenane.

One Block was founded in 2020 to tackle the trash piling up on the Upper West Side during the pandemic. Since then, hundreds of Upper West Siders have been cleaning block after block, filling more than 250,000 garbage bags. Yet under the new rules, it suddenly became more difficult to find a place to leave those trash bags.

A spokesperson from the Department of Sanitation told West Side Rag that the new trash bagging rules still offer a variety of options, including the approved bins, on-street containers, bringing the trash to a DSNY garage, or storing it in a truck or facility. The city also committed $5 million in funding to help Business Improvement Districts across the five boroughs to help purchase the new bins.

Either way, it was the end of the road for One Block, but they leave behind a classic Upper West Side story: when something needs doing, someone here rolls up a sleeve and does it.

Upper West Siders have a long history of taking matters into their own hands. Even back in the 19th century — when swimming in the Hudson was both a beloved pastime and a terrible idea — volunteers formed a rescue group to get the growing number of drownings under control. One of them was Arthur Finn, who, according to the Landmark West! organization, lived on Columbus Avenue between West 89th and 90th streets. On a summer night in 1897, he jumped into the Hudson at West 82nd Street to save a man who was losing his battle with the river’s current.

Decades later, it was the whole neighborhood that seemed to be losing its battle – this time with decline. And again, Upper West Siders stepped up. The renaissance of the Upper West Side in the late ’60s was in no small part their doing. After decades of decay – crime, corruption, abandoned buildings, and a government that mostly looked the other way – something finally shifted, and optimism moved back in. Boutiques, bookstores, florists, antique shops, and restaurants began filling the shopfronts again. Zabar’s considered tripling its size, and business owners returned because, at last, there was business to be done here again.

The city’s Housing and Development Administrator, who toured the neighborhood with investors in 1969, put it this way: “These men are really very important, very conservative cats,” he told New York magazine. “They were stunned by what’s happening on the West Side. They felt it was the most striking piece of city revival they had seen. I can tell you they were impressed.”

And who did the magazine credit with sparking that revival? Upper West Siders themselves. The long period of blight, it wrote, had ”created the most skeptical, municipally wise, politically organized, reform-conscious community in the city. West Siders became the nightmare of city bureaucrats. Citizen groups were formed, and soon there was very little about building codes, city officials, law enforcement, health regulations, education, welfare, relocation, the legislature, youth activities, real-estate assessments, political patronage, corruption and judgeships that they did not know.”

A community movement had taken shape that knew exactly how to get its needs met. As Joseph Lyford wrote in his book “The Airtight Cage: A Study of New York’s West Side”: “They were sometimes so terrifying to bureaucrats that once a group called about the need for fixing some bathroom plumbing, and the next day the city sent down 20 toilet seats.”

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that renaissance wasn’t quite a happily-ever-after. The neighborhood still had some rough years ahead. But if the problems didn’t disappear, neither did the determination of the people who lived here. A perfect example: the volunteers who took on the challenge of pulling Manhattan Valley north of West 96th Street out of its decay.

The Manhattan Valley Development Corporation was a community-run group, founded in 1968, that realized the city wasn’t going to invest a dime in the area’s revival. So they launched their own rehabilitation projects, renovating abandoned and vandalized buildings with an all-volunteer staff. Eventually, the group became the first community-operated organization to be officially recognized and funded for its work by the Housing and Development Administration.

There will always be more things to fix, and many more things that will break. But it seems fair to assume we’ll forever have each other’s backs. That community-minded spirit already shows up in countless ways: feeding the hungry, helping injured birds, tutoring students, beautifying blocks, and spending time with older neighbors. And now, with One Block no longer picking up after us, there’s one more way to volunteer—by not littering in the first place.

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