On a recent fall morning in central Harlem, stacks of plastic garbage bags filled the sidewalks in front of the well-kept brownstones. Some of the black bags leaked brownish-gray liquid, others sat intermingled with discarded furniture. Several contained ragged holes in the sides, where they’d been chewed through by rats the night before.
They actually had Oscar the grouch style trash containers up until the sanitation strike of 1968. For whatever reason they just never came back after the strike ended.