This weekend, we spent about 15 hours combing our backyard with pickaxes, fishing out everything that wasn’t dirt. At one point, we decided to stop digging down, as we had already pulled out 6 55-gallon bags of trash from about 100 square feet of dirt, and there seemed to be no end in sight. We hurled the pile of dirt and crushed bricks back into the 3-foot-deep hole and moved on. A patio will go there, anyhow, and I have pretty much decided that any vegetable I plant will be going in raised planters.
As you can see (maybe not) from the photos, the part we combed is about a foot lower with the trash removed. And it’s all fluffy and churned, so it would probably be about 6 inches lower than that if it were as packed-down as the rest of the yard. The trash dumping began at least 30 years ago, from our guesses, based on the soda bottles that list sugar as the sweetener, instead of corn syrup. We also found a local connection — an old Schaefer’s beer can, brewed right here in Bushwick until 1976.
My neighbor says his yard was the same as ours when he moved in in November ’05, and that it took him from March to September to get it like it is now. I’m hoping with the two of us we can still have some yard to enjoy this summer, though ours is 25 feet wide, and the neighbor’s is only 15…maybe I’ll use beer and ribs to entice some of my cousins from other boroughs to get their nails dirty.
Is there a way I can ask the old owner how her and her family could have just tossed their trash on their own property for decades without offending her? The more trash we pull out, the more disgust we feel toward them — this is 10 times more disgusting than the carpet that had seemingly never been vacuumed and which gave me 3 days of allergy attacks after I pulled it out. Or the fridge with half an inch of fatty slime at the bottom. Or the sewer line we had to get roto-rootered because it was clogged with kitty litter and grease and tampons.
We ended yesterday with 14 bags of trash. The yard is going to need at least a month to be a decent place to hang out. Until then, enjoy the pictures of our misery.
Old mosaic.
Right, our yard; left, neighbor’s yard.
Matt May 7th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
oooh man I feel your pain. And I feel lucky, cuz even though our yard was a bit trashed at least it had a semblance of ‘structure’ with pathways, a rosebush, hydrangea, etc.
And it was mainly a weed pit, not a garbage dump. Except the backfence which was a rubble strewn nightmare.
My advice to you: pick a nice corner and go nuts on it. Get some fill dirt and then you can create a little zone for planting things right away. The best thing we did was section out the yard and take it bit by bit. THree years later it’s amazingly different.
Jeremy May 7th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Yeah this was a total, full-on garbage dump. The building next door was abandoned for years, so the people who lived in my house also threw their trash in that yard. Lineoleum, roofing, hundreds of pounds of glass, plastic bottles, tools, car parts, an entire stove, bicycles, clothing, carpeting, shower curtains, shoes, used paint rollers, tires, tile, bricks, and on top of it, these nasty weeds that bound all the trash together with their evil evil roots.
electricgreek May 7th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
fuckin animal’s
Jimmy Legs May 8th, 2007 at 7:22 am
at my old place i dug up (among other things) shag carpeting under about 9 inches of dirt. turns out the previous owner ‘carpeted’ his yard (!) i can’t tell you how much fun it was getting yards of decomposing shag out of the back.
my new yard is all paved over, some people think i should be disappointed by this fact. i am not.
Jeremy May 8th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Oh yeah, all kinds of shag going on. Yellow, green, red, blue, burnt orange, the list goes on. A lot of linen, actually.
BushwickBK.com » Blog Archive » The Bushwick Panty Bomber September 25th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
[...] yard is no stranger to trash. It’s a good 2 feet higher than the neighbors’ because of the three decades of [...]