A million+ people donned their ceremonial diapers and packed into Times Square yesterday to celebrate the new year—and within an hour after the ball dropped, all those people were quickly dispersed from the area to make way for the NYC Sanitation Department to begin the massive clean up of the area. And Gothamist was right there to document the whole thing.
Photographer Gretchen Robinette started out at the Sanitation Department building before traveling to Times Square with the cleanup crews, which included 177 sanitation workers, plus 33 on-duty supervisors and chiefs. She ended up riding in a small mechanical broom truck as it started its rounds: "We went in circles along the same street perimeter—not an entire block but just one street from corner to corner!—for [about] 15 sweeps," Robinette noted. "That took over an hour, just repeating the same loop picking up trash layer after layer until it’s all gone. A lot of work!" It takes up to seven hours to completely clean everything up in the area before they can leave.
"The broom can pick up everything. We just try to take care of the broom as much as possible," said S. Bishop, who drove the truck in the video below. But she said they have to stop and remove any larger objects, as well as things like towels and clothes, or else they could jam up the broom: "Heavy stuff will break the flight of that."
Altogether, this year's Times Square cleanup crew utilized 18 collection trucks, 28 mechanical brooms, six rack trucks, two haulsters, 53 back pack blowers and 41 hand brooms to get the job. For some context, DSNY removed more than 65 tons of debris last year.
Check out lots of photos of the cleanup above—as long as photos of massive amounts of confetti doesn't stress you out.
