Dumpster Diving Days or NYC On $4 A Day.

Ok, due to popular demand, I will elaborate on my “Dumpster Diving” reference. For those of you not from the NYC/Metropolitan area, you have to understand that Dumpster Diving, is like an Olympic event here in the Big Apple. One man’s trash is another man’s armoire, particularly if you are in the West Village, but that in itself is a whole other blog. Anyway, there is no shame in routing around in someone else trash pile because once it hits the street, it’s up for grabs. I found 5, antique 6 panel doors for my house in the dumpster around the block. The folks renovating that house just chucked them, Solid core 100 year old doors … Their loss. So you see Dumpster Diving isn’t necessarily a gross, stinky proposition … not always …

However, the tale I am going to tell is not quite as quaint as all of this. First we have to roll back the clock – It’s May, 1993. The theatre season in NYC is winding down (and the indie film industry in NYC doesn’t really exist yet). I am still just a freelance theatre / film electrician. When there was work, I worked all the time, but when the season ends, it gets pretty thin. This was a particularly slow year. So, mid year I took a job working in a lighting rental house down in the meat packing district (that’s Washington & 14th Street for those of you who are unfamiliar with area) this is basically the northern most tip of the West Village. The good news was, that I was making enough money to basically pay my rent (half of $450/month) which got me and a buddy of mine a 1 bedroom 5 floor walk up on the Lower East Side. It is incredibly trendy now, back then, not so much. So my meager salary left me about $20/week after rent. Things were thin. The bad news was, the foul stench of hot rotting meat was rather unpleasant.

So, I was basically working exactly, diagonally across town (almost river to river) from where I lived. The other important piece of information you need to know is that the NYC Subway reeks in the summer and the station at 1st Ave & 1st Street (my stop) was the worst in lower Manhattan. Something akin to a gigantic urinal. Very often I would choose to save the $1.25 (yes it was $1.25 back then) and walk home, particularly if it was nice out. Now, the thing you have to understand is that I was not alone. Most of my friends at the time were surviving in the same tax bracket and every dime saved was a dime that could be spent on beer.

Right about now you are thinking “Enough already, tell us about the dumpster diving.” Ok. I am getting to it.

What we, a cadre of virtually unemployed theatre technicians did to ensure that no one went hungry was to develop a system of survival known as “NYC on $4 a day”. There are many ways to get by without cash in NYC if you are smart.

Exhibit #1
One of the big bonuses of working in the meat packing district was that there were dumpsters full of discarded cow shanks that still had huge chunks of meat on them. Of course the foul stench of the meat packing district during the humid months of July and August is enough to make you gag. However, the trade off of actual meat on a regular basis was well worth it. We closed at 5:30pm, the meat packer were done by 4pm and sanitation didn’t show up until 8 or 9pm. So I would grab a garbage bag and run across the street. It took some scrounging but I always managed to find that one shank that still had a meals worth of meat on it and the flies never get down that far …..
While the quality of the meat wasn’t filet, cut up into pieces and cooked for a while it made a fine stew. Very “Sullivan’s Travels” <---(obscure film reference for those of you paying attention.)

Exhibit #2
New York is known for it’s gourmet food stores and the village is chock full of them. Well as every good scrounger knows, Thursday is free pasta sample night at Balducci's. Yes, they actually give you cups of pasta and gourmet sauce to sample while you are shopping, in hopes of getting you to buy some. Not to mention the cheese counter where they will always let you sample a hunk of your favorite stinky foot cheese. The bread counter always has sample bits in a basket and the dessert section always has little bits laid out for you approval. It’s almost like a 4 course meal. That’s just Balducci's. There were other stores on other nights.

Exhibit #3
The illegal Hindu butcher. Downstairs and around the block from my apt on the Lower East Side there was a Hindu butcher shop. However, it wasn’t a legal butcher shop. I am sure that the things that went on in their would have gotten the owners and employees deported, forget about closed down. But, what they did have was a whole chicken (well a very scrawny whole chicken) for $2. So for half my daily disposable income I could purchase a chicken that usually didn’t make me ill. I would cook the whole thing and then douse it in Frank’s Red Hot to kill anything that wasn’t yet dead. Haute Cuisine this was not….

Exhibit #4
B&H Bagels. – The day old bagels that get dumped by them at the end of the night (around 11:30pm) were perfectly fine after you toasted them. I would fill up a back pack full of them and throw them in the freezer. Frozen bagels …. Yum…

Exhibit #5
Last but not least – the thing every college student and starving artist develops a taste for early on…. Ramen noodles. Yep, It’s not great, it might not even qualify as food, but it is filling, cheap and readily available.

Looking back now, these things make me smile. But at the time … Actually it made me smile then also. I have always been a survivor and adventurer.

Of course now I have a proper house, wife and child. It would be bad form to go dumpster diving now … unless there was a really cool wrought iron chandelier in that dumpster of there……