Yesterday was the annual Pride March, which means a wrecked Washington Square Park. I make it an annual habit to take pictures of the state of the park after. As usual, to clarify, I’m selecting the event not to say anything about the march itself, its causes, or its people, but for the garbage. My mission is to change American and global culture and the pictures illustrate our culture. I wish I could record the noise overnight of the street sweepers, garbage trucks, and leaf blowers. They sounded like jet planes right outside my window, hour after hour.

In past years, I’ve gotten up around 3am to take pictures. This year I went around 7pm, when the march had just ended and park was still full of people. I felt too lazy to wake up so early the morning after. Come to think of it, I should have taken video but didn’t think of it. It may not have worked since I was trying to avoid people’s faces.

I think the city is improving how fast it cleans things, but I can’t tell because I hadn’t gone out while the partying was still happening before. If you look below you’ll see a couple pictures of garbage trucks and street sweepers. There were a lot. They didn’t seem that loud during the day, but many they were loud last night.

Even if they clean quickly, moving plastic and other poison that lasts centuries doesn’t reduce the poison, it just moves it. The process effectively steals other people’s land for our waste, a process called colonialism. It also creates perverse incentives in people expecting others will clean for them (we taxpayers pay for the work) and that they are actually cleaning, as opposed to dumping privileged people’s poison onto poor people’s land.

I couldn’t get to the middle of the park since the density of people was too high. Anyway, here’s a representative picture: someone casually sticking waste on top of overflowing waste, already on to her next thing.

For past years’ images and videos:

• “Pride Destroyed the Park”, Washington Square Park after a parade (Video)
• After the Pride and Queer Liberation Marches 2022: Washington Square Park wrecked again. I could cry.
• LGBTQ+ People’s Garbage and Leaving It Worse Than You Found It: The Pride and Queer Liberation Marches 2023

I think the first one shows the most garbage, but I’m too nauseated to check. In any case, this year is nothing like past years.

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Here are the rest from this year:

• ← This week’s selected media, June 29, 2025: two about Corrie ten Boom, Mathematics of Love, Pomodoro Technique
• 824: Dr. Rob Reed, part 2: Learning to love leading effectively →