#INTO THE TRASH IT GOES MEME FREE#

Using the intuition she has honed for years, she will lift a garbage bag, loosen its knot, poke, peek inside, and remove what seems useful. On her near-daily scavenging runs, she spends a couple of hours retracing that day’s recycling or garbage pickup route (a schedule she knows well) with a wheeled suitcase. She’s lived in this apartment for 49 years. I’m used to being tall, and now I’m not as tall.” “I’m now something like five-foot-six.” She’s pretty sure she knows why: “The only thing I can think of is carrying bags on my shoulders all these years and going up the stairs with them.” But then she laughs it off. “You would not know it from looking at me now, but my official adult height is five-foot-ten,” she says. Electric cables and wires go, as do electronic gadgets - even old broken laptops.”Ī recent knee injury and poor circulation in her left leg means she takes it slow going back up to her apartment, where she has lived for 49 years. After all these years, she’s seen what’s fallen out of favor and what still moves: “Frying pans were popular now they’re not. Around 3 a.m., she returns to pack up anything that remains and send what seems unlikely to be adopted - a shredded pair of shoes, a dish-drying rack - back where it came from, bagged on the street with the curbside garbage.

#INTO THE TRASH IT GOES MEME FREE#

Vicki sets up her free store in front of an empty storefront on Ludlow St, next-door to her apartment.Ī free store doesn’t need her to stick around and monitor what’s taken, so Vicki goes about her life - she eats dinner, calls friends, sends emails, and goes out scavenging.

But most of Vicki’s curbside items are salvaged from the garbage piles of the Lower East Side. Plenty of New Yorkers put toys or scratched-up kitchenware out on the sidewalk, hoping that someone else will find them useful. on any night it doesn’t rain, schlepping bags of salvaged goods from her small one-bedroom apartment down five flights of stairs and arranging them on the stoop. Most of the people picking up items or passing by on their way to the bars in the area will never meet Vicki Rovere, the 78-year-old woman who has been running the free store for almost two decades.

On the metal grate behind the books, the mugs, and a dozen other items spread out on a stoop hangs a small handwritten sign taped to a clothes hanger: “The Ludlow Street Free Store.” Two women in their mid-20s wearing fedoras with skateboards tucked under their arms riffled through a stack of books and walked away with Japanese texts on anatomy and Buddhism. A man in tattered clothing carrying a plastic cup filled with coins grabbed a deodorant stick and stuffed it into his pocket. “I’m going to use them for ice cream,” she sheepishly tells me. Over the next 20 minutes, an employee from a nearby taco spot came by on her break and selected two pounded-copper Moscow Mule mugs from the steps. “Some days it’s a gold mine.” The 67-year-old has been making this trek for more than two years. “I walk to work a different way every day, but on my way home I always come up Ludlow to see what’s out,” she says. On a Thursday night, Lauren Gold, a cashier at the Trader Joe’s on the Lower East Side, picked up a black ceramic electric cooking pot with a glass lid from a battered stoop on Ludlow Street. Vicki surrounded by her books and the things she’s collected from the trash.

Into the trash it goes meme