New York follows Chicago's lead with rolling garbage containers, a mere 40 years later

Many Chicagoans probably have never been to New York City. That's too bad. I know the local fashion is to despise the place, sight unseen. But I have been there, many times, for business and pleasure. New York is not without its allures. Manhattan has an energy that generally eludes Chicago. There is interesting architecture, a noteworthy theater scene and numerous good restaurants.

True, the place is provincial as hell. I know that is the opposite of expectations — Chicago is supposed to be the Midwestern cow town, full of rustics who escaped Iowa and Kentucky and still have pig slop ground into the seams of our boots as we stand gawping at the tall buildings.

But New York is far more parochial. That Saul Steinberg drawing, compressing the nation between the Hudson and the Pacific into a bare brown rectangle? That's actually how they view the world.

Earlier this summer, Eric Adams, New York's mayor, announced a daring experiment. He said ... and I can barely get this out without laughing ... he said the city will now introduce rolling garbage cans with hinged lids, crowing that now, instead of piling their garbage bags in the street, a Gotham tradition as ingrained as hot dog carts, this new, space-age technology will be embraced.

"We're going to catch up with everyone else and get these plastic bags off our streets," Adams promised.

Raising the question: How far ahead of New York is Chicago, rolling-trash-can wise? How much catching up does New York have to do?

Forty years. Forty years ago, next week, in fact. On Sept 5, 1984, in the 8th Ward, the first wheeled garbage cart in Chicago was tipped into the first garbage truck equipped with a lift. Four other wards also took part in the pilot program.

At the time, Chicago's garbage record was nothing to brag about. For decades, garbage collection was a notorious mess of patronage, inefficiency and almost unfathomable squalor. Before World War II, apartment-dwellers routinely threw garbage out the windows, as in medieval times. They had to be threatened with fines to do otherwise.

In the 1940s, half of Chicago's alleys were “lined with open piles of filth.” Only about 15% of garbage found its way into a metal can with a lid. A third of the trash was heaped in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter was left in open piles, with the last quarter dumped into large concrete containers. Garbage men went at the piles with shovels.

Enter “the garbage-collection system of the future,” already used by a few smaller cities, including Atlanta, Milwaukee and Tempe, Arizona. It helped enormously that Chicago has some 1,900 miles of alleys. Manhattan has so few I couldn't even find a reliable figure.

In 1984, Mayor Harold Washington welcomed these “supercarts” — 90-gallon wheeled cans with attached lids. There is no proper history of rolling garbage cans I can find — going over patent records, it seems they descended from rolling bins for baseball gear.

What I find most amazing about the story is not just that we beat New York by 40 years but that rolling garbage cans were a hard sell. Change is always a threat to someone. The program was to have begun on April 1, 1984. But Chicago City Council members, fighting to preserve the tradition of doling out trash cans in return for votes, resisted just giving them away without a quid pro quo — another Chicago tradition.

People were terrified of rolling cans. A survey in March 1984 found an astounding 98% of Chicagoans did not want them; 96% were unwilling to even try them.

“It could mean we would have to sell our home,” said a 39th Ward resident.

“Fear of change is the most disturbing fear,” said Ald. Roman Pucinski, who held meetings in his ward to let constituents air their worries — that the wheels would break, or the carts would be impossible for elderly widows to roll, or they would be stolen or vandalized.

And the lids had no handles — that really freaked people out, so much so that one newspaper printed instructions showing how to construct a superfluous handle out of a length of broomstick.

But the rolling carts were better in every way — cleaner for the homeowner, easier for garbage men — and that won out. Once started, the radically improved system eventually caught on. Now, even New York is trying it.

Having navigated around New York's mountainous piles of sidewalk bags, I hope it works, even though it'll rob me of my snidest dismissal of the place: "They throw their gah-bedge in the street!"