The Treasures in the Trash Museum in East Harlem is at turns delightful and sad. Curator Nelson Molina is a city sanitation worker with a nice eye and ear for hidden garbage gems. The whole museum demonstrates how utterly wasteful humans are.
Via Allison Meyer at Hyperallergic, Open House New York (OHNY) arranged the special tour:
The tour was part of OHNY’s yearlong series Getting to Zero: New York + Waste. The Treasures in the Trash Museum is usually off-limits to the public, as it’s housed in the working MANEAST 11 sanitation garage, though it has opened in the past for the annual OHNY Weekend. “Only in New York would we have a sold-out tour of a sanitation garage full of discarded items on a Sunday,” remarked Gregory Wessner, OHNY executive director. He noted that the museum is, in a way, the “heart of this entire series,” as it demonstrates so much about “what we keep and what we discard.”
Lots of other great picture taken by Meier over at Hyperallergic.
• New York City’s Museum of Trash Rescued by a Sanitation Worker (Hyperallergic)