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.
Here are the rest from this year:
Hi,
I’m not from the US, so this is a genuine question: is the Pride parade the only parade held in Washington Square Park, or is the event that leaves the most trash? Are there any other parades, events or marches that take place there, and do they leave less garbage? I’m asking so specifically because such excessive littering might be very bad for the image of the LGBTQ+ community
Greetings from Germany!
Eske
Hi, Greenwich Village hosts two big parades or marches: Halloween and Pride. Pride involves two marches: the original Pride March and the newer Queer Liberation March, which was started by people who felt the original became too corporate. It happens the same day. All follow routes elsewhere so aren’t formally held in Washington Square Park, but the LGBTQ+ community congregates there after hours. As best I can tell, they are below legal age to drink or enter bars, so I think the park ends up being like a club with no bouncers where they can stay out all night, or at least until the police close the park. There is a lot of alcohol openly sold, drunk, and its containers dropped on the ground, likewise weed.
There is another informal event that happens in Washington Square Park, though not officially, which is April 20th, a cannabis celebration day. Before it was legal, many cannabis dealers worked Washington Square Park, so people associate it. I happened in the park that day this year and that group trashed the park as much as the Pride March/Queer Liberation March groups, as I posted about in America has acclimatized to overwhelming garbage. It will increase until we change culture to restore the values we’ve jettisoned.
New York City holds many parades outside Washington Square Park. I don’t go to many so I haven’t seen them up close. I suspect many of them trash their parade routes, but probably not as much as the Pride/Queer and cannabis groups trash this park. They don’t stay in one place for over five hours with a party atmosphere.