The big city

This is a pile of trash on the street around the corner from my office. It was as tall as me.

These heaps are de rigeur in the evening: pretty much every restaurant, cafe, apartment building and office block has bags and bags of garbage dumped in the street. Even the recycling is bagged up.The green wheelie bins don't get a look in.

Incredibly gross. And you can imagine what this smells like in summer.

People go through the rubbish a lot here. Homeless people pick through the trash for food and cigarette butts, for cans to recycle, for cardboard and paper to make beds. There are trash collectors in all the Midtown and Downtown districts whose job it is to clean up after litterers and empty garbage bins. They have to reach into the bins, sort through stuff and take out the bulky items and put them in bags, instead of changing over the bin liners. Such a degrading job.

Now that its below 5c at night, the subway stations have become bedrooms, living rooms and toilets for thousands of folks, mostly men, who don't fit into the shelters. They toss sleeping bags down on cardboard and tie their battered luggage to a leg. They hunch over themselves on benches with hoods pulled over their faces. Sometimes they sleep on the sidewalk on top of the hot subway air vents, their heads inches away from hurtling traffic. I've seen people sprawled, passed out, straight on the cement, in the middle of a platform or on the street, their pants full of shit and their mouths gagging open, lips dry. Pedestrians step around them. 10 year old kids walk past without batting an eye. It's truly distressing.

There are a few homeless people I have come to recognise because they're in the same spot each day. There's a young woman who lives under a window of the NY public library on 5th Ave, who draws incessantly and today told me I had spiders and snakes crawling all over me. There's an old man with severely swollen feet in podiatry slippers who lives on the uptown platform of our subway, and another older guy who is usually strung out and strings out all his stuff too across the downtown concourse. There's a big young guy who opens the door for people at the local McDonald's for spare change, and lives a few doors down in a deserted storefront.

There are supposedly about 35,000 homeless people in NY who stay in shelters, and about 14,000 of them are children. On my walk to and from the subway - 1 block in both directions- I must pass at least 5 people either begging or sitting with all their worldy possessions clustered around them.

I don't think I'll ever get used to it.