I was watching a documentary about the Bronx, and they talked about the abandoned buildings and how, back in the day, some landlords would burn them down for the insurance money. I was a kid during that era, and I remember seeing buildings catch fire more than once. On my block, it always seemed to be the same building going up.
When we lived on Walton Avenue, there was another abandoned building across the street. It had some kind of back lot. When we had to take the trash out, we’d go up to the roof, and my father would grab the bags, spin them around, and launch them across into that building.
One day I looked down to see where the trash was actually going. I was a little kid, and it had always just been “the thing we did,” so I never thought about it. When I looked over the edge through the fire escape, I saw it bags and bags, hundreds of them piled up at the bottom. It looked like a garbage dump.
Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed at how unsanitary that was, living right next to a building filled with trash. That probably explains all the mice and rats we dealt with in every building back then. I don’t remember any smell in our apartment, probably because we were on the fourth floor, but still, it’s something to think about that this was happening in what was supposed to be modern America in the 1980s.
We didn’t have phone cameras back then, so I don’t have any pictures. I wish I could show you exactly what I saw.
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