AI Summary
5 min readIn February, a woman named Alan was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City when she noticed trash flapping in the wind—tampons, condoms, underwear, socks, receipts, and hundreds of love locks tied to the bridge's fencing. She was carrying a wine key with a serrated edge. She started cutting the things off. Within months, she and a volunteer named Max—who uses an angle grinder—had removed over 1,200 pounds of locks and debris. This episode of Flightless Bird uses Alan's one-person cleanup mission as a lens to examine how New York City handles trash, why it looks and smells the way it does, and what counts as garbage in the first place.
The Brooklyn Bridge as a trash magnet
The love lock phenomenon on the Brooklyn Bridge has been a problem for over a decade. In 2016, a section of the bridge actually fell into traffic because it was weighed down with locks. The city responded by cutting locks off and posting signs threatening a $100 fine for each one, but the locks kept reappearing. Alan noticed that the locks attracted other kinds of trash: people started tying all sorts of objects to the same fencing. "When it rains, it deteriorates and it falls into the East River, which is already disgusting," she told host David Farrier.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:05) **Cold Open: Love Locks as Trash** - David and Rosabel riff on the episode's premise: a woman who cuts love locks off the Brooklyn Bridge, and whether those locks count as trash.
- 2 (01:21) **Episode Premise: New York’s Trash Problem** - David sets up his curiosity about New York’s trash, from foul bags and rats to the specific trash that caught his attention: love locks and junk stuck to the Brooklyn Bridge.
- 3 (02:34) **Terminology & Regional Trash Culture** - David and Rosabel compare trash terms (rubbish vs. trash, bin vs. trash can) and how different US cities handle waste.
- 4 (10:41) **New York’s Trash as Identity** - David argues that New Yorkers romanticize the grunge and stress of their city, wearing the trash piles as a badge of gritty authenticity.
- 5 (13:39) **Meet Alan: The Bolt-Cutter Vigilante** - David introduces Alan, a New York native who took action against the trash on the Brooklyn Bridge, unlike the podcast hosts who just talk about it.
- 6 (17:16) **The Specific Trash That Got Alan’s Goat** - Alan describes the accumulation of hair ties, locks, and other "bits and bobs" affixed to the Brooklyn Bridge’s fencing, which she considers literal garbage.
- 7 (23:24) **The Love Lock Problem: History & Danger** - David explains that love locks on the Brooklyn Bridge have become a structural hazard, even causing a piece of the bridge to fall off in 2016.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
In this week’s Flightless Bird, David looks into the state of trash in the USA, through the eyes of a New Yorker who’s made it her mission to clean up all the trash on the Brooklyn bridge. New Yorkers produce more than 14 million tons of waste every year, with 44 million pounds of trash flung onto the curb every day. Begging the question: What’s it like in the rest of the country?
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