User:Jorge Stolfi/The streets of New York

Songs are still being sung about the hundreds of brave men who once achieved the impossible, and saved their beloved town from a terrible fate. Here their tale is told and preserved, so that their memory will not perish from the minds and hearts of men.

A stroke of genius

Once upon a time, the street sweepers of New York got into a lengthy strike, and the afair got so embroiled that no one ould foresee the end of it. To save the city's streets from being submerged in trash, the Mayor issued a call for volunteer sweepers.

Five brave men answered the call. The Mayor gave each a warm hug, a broom and a trash-pail and sent them out to do their work.

The Mayor's idea had been received with great skepticism at first; many (perhaps even the Mayor himself) doubted that volunteers could do well at a job that that was hard enough for paid professionals. But skepticism turned to wonderment when those five guys, with two days of intense labor, managed to clear up a good section of Broadway and a couple blocks of Fifth Avenue. The feat was shown on TV, and citizens came from all over town to marvel at their work. Thanks to that media exposure, another four volunteers soon showed up at the Mayor's office.

The days went on, and the Mayor's satisfaction became tainted with worries, as he began to realize the magnitude of the work to be done. Not only the streets had to be cleaned, but also alleys, squares, parks, metro stations, depots, public buildings, and more. As soon as a main avenue was cleaned, the junk on the its side streets became even more obvious. Meanwhile, those streets which had been cleaned were getting fouled up again; often by trash dumped on purpose by vandals, and sometimes also by opportunists who dumped their private trash on the street rather than take it to a dumpster. So an increasing part of the sweepers' workday was spent on just maintaining the status quo. Fortunately, as the work grew, so did the volunteer force — by now a good fifteen men strong.

New York 1.0

One day, while discussing the impact of the strike on the city's external image, the Mayor casually remarked that they could perhaps concentrate on a couple dozen of the most important streets, and designate them as a sort of theme park, to serve as the city's showcase. Perhaps they could even charge for admission, to help offset the rising costs of brooms and trash carts.

Some aldermen eagerly picked up the idea, and promptly recruited half a dozen of the volunteer sweepers to work on the project — which came to be known as "New York 1.0". Three of the volunteers were charged with the task of identifying the "most important streets of New york" and assessing their priority and cleanliness status. To avoid biases, they set up a system of cross-assessments whereby a street would be nominated by one volunteer, assigned by a second one to three others, who would independently scan it and report their grades to a sixth, who served as tabulator and arbiter of disputes.

They started with the obvious places, such as Broadway, Fifth, Harlem, Grand Central Station, etc.; but since the streets had to form a connected whole, the list eventually grew to about two hundred roads. Each street was then visited by the assessment team and classified into Sparkling Clean, Fairly Clean, So So, and Yeech status. Those volunteers who were not tied up in the assessment work, whether affiliated to the project or not, were exhorted to concentrate their efforts on those "important" streets. To motivate them, little green paper "medals" were attached to the lamposts of streets which attained Sparkling Clean status; an achievement which required not only removing all trash and washing the pavement, but also trimming the lawn, painting the utility poles and polishing any fencerails. Every morning, a Street of the Day was chosen by the city Council, and cab drivers were instructed to take their passengers through it whenever possible.

The brotherhood of the broom

Contrary to general expectations, the ranks of volunteer sweepers kept growing as the weeks passed by. Soon there were about twenty people showing up daily at the City's hastily set up Broom Distribution Office. Essential amenities were arranged for them at City Hall, such as private lockers, a lounge with sofas, bulletin boards, etc. The volunteer sweepers soon became a socially cohesive sub-population of the City Hall residents, sharing distinctive customs, slang, social events, and informal rules of conduct.

One evening, for example, one of the sweepers gave to a colleague a truck-squashed beer can, saved from her daily catch, as a half-mocking medal for the extraordinary broommanship he had displayed that afternoon. Over the following months, this spontaneous joke evolved into a ritual played out every friday evening around the coffe machine, when an elaborate aray of beer-can condecorations, covering all sorts of distinguished behaviors, would be solemny appointed on deserving heroes of the broom.

As is usual in such circumtances, some volunteers soon stood out as natural leaders of the community. They came to spend more time at headquarters than out in the streets, and tended to dominated all debates and decision-making. Since then, as everybody knows, a large segment of the volunteer sweepers have organized themselves into a large and complex bureaucracy, with dozens of roles and ranks — Administrators, Supervisors, Trustees, Seneschals, Grand Marshalls, and many more — variously elected or appointed, each with its specific duties and privileges.

Many other sweepers, on the other hand, came to detest the place and despise those bureaucrats, with their broom politics and garbage-pail philosophy. Those solitary cowboys would leave home in the early morning for their work-street, and return only well after sunset, carrying their own broom and shovel-box — so that they would not have to go through the Broom Office to pick them up. They were hardly noticed while they were among us, and their names hardly apper in the chronicles. Yet we must not forget that, while our valiant bureaucrats were busy designing badges and debating protocols, it was those grumpy loners who actually took the trash out of our streets. Which perhaps is not an insignificant contribution to the whole enterprise after all.

The pains of growth

Both at headquarters and out in the streets, shouting matches frequently arose, as people of assorted backgrounds — who would normally avoid each other — were forced to come into close contact, face to face and broom to broom. In some cases, disgruntled volunteers lapsed into vandalism, upturning trash buckets or throwing their colleagues' lunch out with the junk. "Broom wars", when each man would keep sweeping the same pile of trash into the other's territory, soon became a common occurrence. With the hope of mitigating those conflicts, some volunteers set out to write a Street Sweeping Manual and the attendant Standards, Procedures, and Rules of Conduct, carefully defining terms like "street" and "trash", specifying what material should be picked up and what could be left on the street, whether sidewalks should be swept longitudinally or transversely, how disputes should be arbitrated, and so on. (They have been working tirelessly on that project to this day, and the ponderous leather-bound volumes of the Manual already fill up three large mahogany shelves in Sweepers Lounge.)

But the most conspicuous problem, that not even the most distracted tourist would fail notice, was the general lack of organization of the sweepers in the streets. Instead of working according to some systematic schedule or towards specific goals, many volunteers were just rambling aimlessly through the city, sweeping and picking up any trash they came about. Others became overly obsessesed with one particular piece of street, and would work on it, exclusively and intensely, for weeks on end — while other transversal roads, much more important, were knee-deep in filth. Many sweepers, especially those at headquarters, assumed that this lack of organization was to blame for the fact that, three months after the Mayor's initial appeal, the city still looked as filthy as ever; to the point that most streets had yet to see their first sweeper. (This interpretation was understandable, considering that most of those people were not aware of the numbers involved. Had they been, many would probably have quit right away.)

The issue of (dis)organization of the street work was brought before the Sweepers Council, as soon as that body got established at headquarters. After much ponderous debating, a bright young fellow came up with the idea — very warmly received by the other Councillors — of letting the sweepers themselves organize the work of their colleagues. He porposed that, whenever a sweeper ran into a street that had never been swept, and which he did not feel like cleaning himself, he would leave a note behind, urging any colleague who could come after him to put his broom to work. The proposal was approved and immediately put in practice. Thousands of large sheets of glossy paper, each about the size of a newspaper and bearing the acronym of the project's motto ("Street Trash, Use Broom") in large block letters, were printed by the Mayor's staff and distributed among the volunteers.

The men in the streets, too, were generally receptive of the idea; some of them even gave up sweeping, and from then on spent their whole day exploring the remotest corners of the town in search of streets to place the S.T.U.B. tags on. Within a few days, half of the city streets had one of those colorful banners strewn on top of its still (generally pristine) filth.

At that point, however, many sweepers complained that they were still feeling confused ad disoriented, as there were so many filthy roads around them, all tagged "S.T.U.B." To solve that problem, more S.T.U.B. banners were printed, this time with qualifiers like "party trash", "office trash", "farmer's market trash", and so on. Ten of the volunteers were charged with the mission of distributing those specific S.T.U.B. tags all over the town, replacing the old generic ones. This required expanding the ranks of the taggers and the number of printed tags, since each street now had to be examined by several men, and many streets would need several specialized tags.

While no one was able to quantify the impact in terms of street cleaning, the initiative left both the "broom operators" (as they were mockingli called) and the general citizens quite happy. A sweeper was now able to quickly find, among all filthy roads facing him, the one which best matched his personal inclination and abilities. And all common citizens were now satisfied that "something" had been done, at last, about the filth on their street.

Let a thousand projects bloom

But problems were not over. Since its start, the "NY 1.0" project had been facing great difficulties. Its all-volunteer work force was essentially unpredictabile and unmanageable, and was torn between their pledge to help the project and the dismal state of the roads beyond the project's scope, half of which had still to get their most basic clean-up. The volunteers who ran the project could not even keep the assessment system working properly; it required coordinating too many people, none of whom could be trusted to complete any assigned task. After repeatedly missing their self-imposed deadlines, the project leaders decided to decentralize, by dividing the task of classifying and assessing the streets among several sub-projects. To that end, a third classification of streets into broad overlapping "project domains" was established — with some some domains based on geographic locations like Queens or Manhattan, some on location type like "theater streetfronts" or "parking lots", and some on the nature, texture, thickness, or smell of the trash.

It was hoped that these sub-projects could attract volunteers who had fondness for and expertise in their respective domains. And indeed the idea was a great success: within, a week about a hundred sub-projects had been started by enthusiasts. Many sweepers took some time off the streets to work on project administration — setting up the sub-project's desk at headquarters, coordinating the assessment work, bookkeeping, etc. Others took to patrolling the City, on the lookout for roads that might fall under the sub-project's purview. Upon finding such a road, the patroller would identify it with a large sign in garish colors attached to a lamppost. Some streets soon were sporting half a dozen or more of those project signs. Other volunteers undertok the task of writing project-specific appendices for the Street Sweeping Manual, which detailed (or sometimes contradicted) the rules set forth in that venerable document. (These appendices, still under work, now occupy two additional shelves in Sweepers Lounge — on the right side as one enters, across from the Master Manual shelves.)

The turning point

In the ensuing months, public expectations continued to grow, much faster than the pool of workers. The influx of new volunteers was partly negated by mounting losses. Many who joined the gang left after a month or two, bored and frustrated by the hard and never-ending work. Others left after becoming embroiled in broom fights, or having suffered particularly vicious vandal attacks. Several sweepers had to seek treatment for stress; others quit when they realized that their generosity towards the City was hurting their professional and social lives. A few even showed clear symptoms of addiction. Sadly, as those victims had no formal employment ties with the City, they could not get any support or compensation from it, and were just abandoned to their fate.

Stress also afflicted the "white-collar" volunteer sweepers, those who spent all their time at headquarters — writing rules, tabulating and classifying streets, designing signs and banners, and generally managing the work of other sweepers. Paradoxically, they were the most affected by the large (and growing) the disproportion between the work to be done and the number of men available to do it. By now the force had reached 100 sweepers, but the city guides listed no less than 50,000 streets. Therefore there were "only" 500 streets for each man and his broom; and this number did not even account for all the volunteers who were actually engaged in administration and political debates at Headquarters, or who had been drafted to work on assessment patrols and S.T.U.B.-tagging teams. It also failed to account for the long hours that street sweepers had to spend at Headquarters, filling out a myriad of forms and surveys and answering to dozens of disciplinary and fact-finding committees.

To a sweeper out in the street, those dreadful numbers actually made little difference. Considering that it would take him two months of strenuous work to bring a Yeech-class street up to Sparkling Clean status, it made no difference whether his "quota" was five streets or five thousand. In either case, he had enough work to last for a lifetime. In either case, the contribution he could give the City, and the moral reward he could expect to get, would be just the same: one street-block's worth per day, tops.

For the managers, on the other hand, those numbers were devastating, because they meant that their work was completely pointless. No matter how they might organize their categories, domains, and S.T.U.B. classes, or embroid their rules and procedures, it would make no difference in the end. All their sweeper-managenebt tools — sub-projects, grading systems, to-do lists, task forces, punishments and rewards — might perhaps sway workers from one neighborhood to another, or trade one "Sparkling" street for twenty "So So" ones; but they could not increase the rate at which trash was being taken out of the streets, not by a single bucketload. And anyone could compute that, at the ongoing rates, they would never get even the NY 1.0 streets to Sparkling Clean status; much less make a dent on the 25,000 Yeech-class streets of New York which had yet to feel the bristles of a broom.

The reaction of the managers, understandably, was one of denial. They instinctively learned to avoid statistics or any other information that would remind them of those terrifying numbers.

Let a thousand streets vanish

This gloomy context must be taken into account if one is to make sense of the ensuing developments. A small group of sweepers, including several bureaucrats and political activists, convinced themselves that they could solve the problem by diminishing the number of streets. So they took posession of an office in the basement of Headquarters — two flights of stairs down from the back entrance, then then twenty yards to the left through a narrow unlit passageway, behind a door labeled "Avenues for Diminishment". In that office, at the bottom of a locked file cabinet, they kept a Black List (which was actually printed in light blue paper) of streets that were, by their consensual opinion, considered unworthy of cleaning.

The system would work as follows. When a member of the KKK ("Knights of Keep or Kaput", as they had been nicknamed by their adversaries) found a street which apparently had never been swept, he posted there a note that the street was being considered for diminishment, and added the street's name at the bottom of that list. Other sweepers then were given three days to come to the A.f.D office and append their vote — Diminsh or Keep — at the bottom of the list. (Most street sweepers and non-KKK bureaucrats had some difficulty getting there, but that was not a problem as the KKK members would routinely scan the list and vote on all entries.) After that period, if the majority of votes was "Diminish" (or even if it wasn't), the KKK would dispatch a gang of City workers to close off the street by erecting tall concrete walls at every intersection.

The system at first worked fairly well. Initial fears that the residents of walled-up streets would complain proved groundless, because City laws stipulated that only the residents of a street could file a complaint about it. Since each street was thoroughly evacuated before being walled up (a precaution that demonstrates the consideration given by KKK members to the citizens of New York), it obviously ceased to have residents — and, a fortiori, dissatisfied residents. As a futher safety measure, the residents were not told why they were being evacuated, and the walls were carefully shaped and finished to resemble old building façades; so that, when the former residents returned, they would not even be able to find their street, and would leave town without realizing what had happened. The rare complaints came only from the occasional sweeper who had spent days or weeks trying to clean up the street, only to have all his work lost.

Offhand, the Mayor and his staff found KKK's approach rather attractive on the whole — as it saved some money in many lines of the budget (police, traffic signs, pavement maintenance, etc.) and reduced the habitual influx of complaints and lawsuits. At the time, no on could have foreseen its dire consequences.

[to be finished]