Happy New Year!
Maybe you stayed up late last night to see the first moments of this Monday, January 1.
Maybe you even went out to one of the many public New Year’s events, like the one in New York City’s Times Square.
Each year it hosts something like a million people hoping to see the famous ball drop.
And then, once the giant party is done and the revelers have headed home, the giant cleanup effort begins.
Untapped New York took a closer look at how workers put Times Square back into ship shape the morning after.
The city’s Department of Sanitation sends hundreds of workers into Times Square with brooms and blowers.
In recent years they have collected and disposed of something like 132,000 pounds of garbage, confetti, noisemakers and other stuff that the partygoers have left behind.
All of that is collected and sent away in dozens of trucks.
It’s a heavy lift, but those workers and their equipment can move all of that trash and put the area back to its pre-New Years state in 12 to 16 hours.
If you’re headed to Manhattan next December 31, do what you can to help keep the area clean, because I’m sure these workers would appreciate the help.
It was today in 2023 that Hody Childress of Geraldine, Alabama passed away.
Afterward, the owner of the local pharmacy told the Washington Post that for years, Childress would come in and quietly hand over a folded up $100 bill.
He said he wanted to help people in town who couldn’t afford to buy their medications and prescriptions.
Over time those gifts helped hundreds of neighbors in need.
Maybe we can all be a little more neighborly in 2024!
HOW DOES NYC CLEAN UP AFTER THE NEW YEAR’S EVE BALL DROP IN TIMES SQUARE? (Untapped New York)
Farmer dies; town learns he secretly paid strangers’ pharmacy bills (Washington Post)
Backers, there’s an exclusive bonus New Year’s episode for you on the Patreon page
Photo by gigi_nyc via Flickr/Creative Commons
