Move it!
Politicians and residents lined up Sunday to demand the Sanitation Department find a new home for the trash trucks it has been parking on a residential stretch of the East Village for nearly a year — despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to fix the situation.
“It’s disgusting, it smells, the smell lingers, it’s attracting rats, it’s a quality of life issue and it needs to be solved immediately,” said US Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) at the event. “We need a better solution than parking sanitation trucks on a residential block.”
“We understand the city needs to find a better solution, but find one, don’t come moving into a neighborhood and slowly destroying it,” the longtime lawmaker added.
The Sanitation Department has been parking trucks along a stretch of East 10th Street between First and Second Avenues since September when it lost its lease on a West Side garage. Officials have said they picked the stretch of street last year as a temporary solution in part because it’s near DSNY’s local offices.
But that explanation has done little to allay the neighborhood’s fury.
“Last week I had a rat run across my foot. I lived here for 20 years and I’ve never seen a rat” until the trash trucks showed up, said Marian Caracciolo, who lives on the corner of East 10th and First Avenue. “I thought it was a cat, and then I realized it was a rat.”