URBAN TACTICS; Nabbing the Elusive Nickel
By SAKI KNAFO
Published: July 9, 2006
But several afternoons each week, the space in front of the building becomes a market of sorts, a place where scores of men and a few women gather to earn a modest living from the city's refuse.">
THE four-story warehouse at 603 West 29th Street doesn't look like much. A set of beat-up metal gates permanently shutter the truck bays, and a couple of faded yellow signs reading ABA Beverage Inc. are all that adorn this brick building on the northwestern edge of Chelsea.
But several afternoons each week, the space in front of the building becomes a market of sorts, a place where scores of men and a few women gather to earn a modest living from the city's refuse.
This is a redemption center, the purgatory of the recycling world, where bottles and cans are sorted before being sent back to the companies that made them. Unlike many supermarkets, which set limits on the number of containers they will accept each day from one person, most redemption centers pay refunds on unlimited returns, making them the favored drop-off sites of those who recycle to survive.
Over the past few years, however, partly as a result of the soaring value of real estate in Manhattan, redemption centers have virtually disappeared from the borough. ABA Beverage Mart, once housed inside the warehouse on 29th Street, closed in 2004. Eight months ago, a nonprofit organization in Midtown that served as a redemption center also closed up shop, leaving scores of Manhattan-based ''canners,'' as many can and bottle collectors call themselves, with no choice but to haul their unwieldy troves around the supermarket circuit.
Then an enterprising canner named Eugene Gadsden decided to do something about it.
Mr. Gadsden, 48, is a handsome man with a serious manner who speaks in a baritone stutter. One recent day he wore four rubber bands on his left wrist, one for each week since he last succumbed to his addiction to crack cocaine, with which he said he has struggled for decades. It would take 23 rubber bands to show the number of years since he earned his first nickel depositing a can.
After the 29th Street redemption center closed, Mr. Gadsden, a fixture at the building, persuaded the superintendent to let canners continue storing and sorting their wares outside on the sidewalk. Then, in the summer of 2005, he and several other canners, all members of a committee formed by Picture the Homeless, an advocacy group led by homeless people, approached Eldar Rakhamimov, who owns a redemption center in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
Mr. Rakhamimov, a stocky Russian immigrant, agreed to visit the site at least twice a week in his battered truck to buy recyclable containers from the canners, who, in the past six months, have swelled in number to 25 from about 5. Some canners complain that Mr. Rakhamimov pays only four cents per container, a penny less than they would get at a supermarket. Mr. Gadsden, for his part, said that he was satisfied because he could still pull in $700 or $800 a month, enough to share a two-bedroom rental in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood in the Bronx. He recently moved there after spending nearly a decade on the streets.
''You have to treat it like a regular job,'' said Mr. Gadsden, who often works as many as four 12-hour night shifts a week, trawling a strategic network of routes that takes him from 11th Avenue to First Avenue and from 14th Street to 51st Street. Beyond that, he said, he more or less lives at the redemption center, retreating to his apartment only two or three times each week, after the truck makes a pickup.
Apart from the center, Mr. Gadsden's livelihood depends on a rickety grocery cart, which he calls Betsy. Carts are the trusty steeds of a canner's trade, and they come in many varieties: metal shopping carts and canvas mail carts; carts adorned with stuffed animal figureheads; carts stuffed with foam mattresses and sprouting salvaged umbrellas. In keeping with a canners' tradition, Mr. Gadsden surrounded the well of his cart with a sort of picket fence built from broomsticks. The contraption allows him to transport as many as 15 overstuffed garbage bags -- or, as he puts it, ''$150''-- at a time.
On days when Mr. Rakhamimov is scheduled to make a pickup, a fleet of carts assembles at the 29th Street center. The canners stand sorting their pickings into car-sized piles of boxes and bags: glass with glass, metal with metal, plastic with plastic.
A couple from Ecuador, Nestor Laso, 78, and Maria Laso, 66, are among the most prolific. Before taking up canning, they worked on a farm in their native land.
Asked to compare canning with farming, Mr. Laso smiled weakly. ''You suffer here, too,'' he said through an interpreter. ''But at least you can try to improve your living conditions.''
Along with the Lasos, the crowd often includes a teenage brother and sister from Mexico and an irascible man with dreadlocks known as Slim.
A diverse group, they are bound together by a tenuous allegiance to Mr. Gadsden. Some refer to him as the ''owner.'' They pay him a few dollars a week, and in return, he looks after carts left otherwise unattended for a stretch. He regularly sweeps the pavement in front of the warehouse to keep neighbors from complaining. As a matter of good business, no one is allowed to use drugs on the block, an edict Mr. Gadsden has sometimes enforced with his fists.
''I don't care what people do,'' he likes to say. ''Just don't do it here.''
ON the rare occasions when Mr. Gadsden takes time off, he leaves the business in the hands of a canner and former building superintendent, Phillip Jackson.
One recent morning, Mr. Jackson and a few cohorts sat around on crates listening to jazz on a portable radio and sharing a pint of cheap vodka. As soon as the truck arrived, Mr. Jackson leaped into action, snatching up a broom and using it to jam a pile of bulging trash bags into the truck.
Next door, in a renovated warehouse that serves as the studio of the artist Jeff Koons, a crew of fashionably dressed artist's assistants went about their tasks. Galleries have been cropping up all over this rapidly gentrifying part of Chelsea, leading some canners to wonder if their own presence will always be tolerated. ''I just pray that everything will work out,'' Mr. Gadsden said.
But on this day, after a mountain of glass and aluminum was loaded onto the truck, the mood of the crowd suddenly lightened. Mr. Rakhamimov pulled out his wallet and began shouting out the canners' names: ''Jackson! Laso! Slim!''
One at a time, they stripped off their work gloves and stepped forward.
Photos: PAYDAY -- Eugene Gadsden, foreground, has made a name for himself in the world of redeemable bottles. (Photographs by Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)