The Other Race This Weekend: 480 Sanitation Workers Clean the Marathon Route, Hours After 189 Cleared the Parade
Eight hours separated the end of the Halloween parade from the start of the marathon. Between them — and behind both — stood the Department of Sanitation: hundreds of workers, 158 trucks parked as blockades, and a promise to leave no water cup behind.
Every big weekend in New York has a second event hiding inside it. This one had two: about eight hours separated the end of the Village Halloween Parade on Saturday night from the start of the marathon on Sunday morning, and the Department of Sanitation worked both sides of the gap — first as a safety wall, then as the cleanup crew for 60,000 runners, some 2.5 million fans, 80,000 costumed paraders and 2 million spectators.
The department's weekend began before either crowd arrived. For the past week, Sanitation has worked with the Department of Transportation to sweep the marathon route through all five boroughs, Fast Company reported from its interview with Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson. Right before each event, workers parked salt spreaders filled with sand to make them heavier, along with collection trucks, as blockades — 40 at key intersections around the Halloween parade and 158 along the 26.2-mile marathon course.
The turnarounds are the hard part. Once the Police Department cleared Saturday night's parade streets, 189 sanitation workers and 17 supervisors moved in — brooms, blowers and the mechanical brooms the commissioner calls the department's most effective tool — to hand the West Village back before the city woke. For the marathon, the numbers grow: 480 sanitation workers on cleaning duty and another 370 staffing the blockades, with the heaviest manpower at the Staten Island start, scooping the garments runners abandon after queuing for hours. The department's own post put the mission in one line: clean the 26.2-mile route, leaving no water cup behind. Some of its workers were racing, too — the department fields a running team, the DSNY Trash Dashers.
What the crowds leave is predictable in kind if not in weight: food and drink litter around the parade, and water cups, banana peels and gel packs along the marathon course. The test of the operation is the one Anderson set for it in the interview — streets that end the weekend looking cleaner than they did before the events started. By Monday morning's commute, most New Yorkers will judge it without ever knowing it ran.
