We New Yorkers have a long and noble tradition of furnishing our apartments with junk we find on the street. For example, our favorite light fixture, a touch lamp with three settings in the shape of a rose, was found on Lafayette Street in the wee hours of a March morning, circa 2004. But today comes the distressing news that the Sanitation Department does not look so kindly upon our freecycling and our Craigslist-moderated curb alerts.
The Daily News ran a story about a Park Slope man who was fined $100 for putting his dresser in front of his house, and then mentions that "it's also illegal for a passerby to pick up an item left at the curb for Sanitation." This jogged our memory of an article from last summer about a Queens man and his little old aunt being fined a whopping $2,000 for putting a used air conditioner in their car, in which the Sanitation Department told us that "it's not always illegal to pick up something from the street, it's only when a vehicle is involved."
Concerned and about the status of our living rooms, we reached out to the Sanitation Department again for some clarity, and here is what we learned: the Park Slope man was fined $100 for putting his dresser out on a Sunday, which was not a regularly scheduled pickup day; there's a separate $100 fine for picking up refuse (including free furniture) from a household; and the $2,000 fine applies to people who are lucky enough to load their finds into a vehicle.
Got that? It's illegal to put out, pick up, and especially pick up in a car, awesome street furniture like this.
