The city parks department has turned a stretch of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park into a de facto garbage dump in order to handle all the trash collected from the popular green space each weekend.<\/p>\n
Locals say the department has used the northern entrance of the park at 41st Street and Sixth Avenue as a staging area for trash bags since the start of the summer. The pile on Monday included tree branches, a mattress, a television and other loose litter. Visitors gripe that inconsistent pickups leave the pile swarming with flies as rats climb from its depths.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis used to be a nice clear entry to the park, but since they started piling up the bagged garbage, we’ve seen so much other garbage, and we started to see rats and everything,\u201d said Eric Fretz, who lives down the street from the park.<\/p>\n
The pile of trash at Sunset Park often grows so big that locals start dumping their own household garbage there.<\/p>\n
Liam Quigley \/ Gothamist<\/p>\n
\u201cThey gave them a buffet over here,\u201d said neighbor Jeffrey Calderon, 42, who added that he\u2019d file a 311 complaint about the pile. \u201cI could smell it from across the street. So I would love for Mamdani to just come right here and just stand 10 to 15 feet away, and take a good whiff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parks department spokesperson Gregg McQueen said trash bags throughout the hilly park are taken to the northern entrance for collection, but said people have started dumping their household waste in the pile \u2013 which can result in a $5,000 fine.<\/p>\n
\u201cPark cleanliness is a top priority, and our staff cleans Sunset Park on a daily basis,\u201d spokesperson Gregg McQueen wrote in a statement. \u201cPlease take out what you bring in and dispose of refuse in proper receptacles, and refrain from dumping household trash in our public spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liam Quigley \/ Gothamist<\/p>\n
Parks officials said trash is collected from the location daily, and that all city parks will receive sealed trash containers, which will arrive at Sunset Park by the end of 2026.<\/p>\n
The parks department operates a fleet of 112 garbage trucks that collect trash from its parks, and in some cases uses public space to store piles of bags before they’re collected.<\/p>\n
Last summer, parks workers cleaned up a dump and hauled away 15 tons<\/a> of trash at the agency\u2019s Bronx headquarters after a Gothamist report found the pile had begun stinking up a nearby greenway<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The city parks department has turned a stretch of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park into a de facto garbage dump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-313709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}