Did your mother ever tell you, “Don’t touch that! If people threw it out, there must be a reason!”? Well, there is a reason: people are pigs.
I’ll never forget that first big haul. I started out around the Fullerton el station, and by the time I worked my way down to Clybourn and Armitage, I had my arms full. Shopping bags overflowing with pillows, planters, rugs, and lamps, I slowly made my way back to Lincoln, where a merchant friend was nice enough to let me put my finds in the back room for a few hours.
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There were five or six more trips to the back room as the day went on. I covered most of the residential side streets between Sheffield and the lake, from Armitage to Belmont. That was the day I got a beautiful dog-eared cactus, six hunter green and matching floral throw pillows, a collection of greenish rag rugs, cream-and-sage eyelet batiste curtains, a pottery table lamp, and a brass urn. Plus many lesser items.
Focus on renters’ areas, especially ones where residents have high incomes but high job turnover–as in sales, marketing, and other yuppie-type jobs. Clue: Look for those three-ring binders of corporate training materials and piles of glossy promotional throwaways. Three-flats are the best–enough space to accumulate too much stuff and accessible black bins in back. In multiunit buildings and high-rises the Dumpsters are often secured under lock and key.
In fact there’s a whole class of housewares–curtains, curtain rods, area rugs, sheets and pillowcases, mugs, and kitchen paraphernalia–that, like window shades, somehow mysteriously “won’t fit” in the new place. A lot of this kind of stuff people just don’t seem to take with them anymore, period. As if plastic buckets were “meant” to be tossed, like plastic knives and forks. I’m convinced some of them only bought the bucket and mop that day, to clean up the place so they could get their security deposit back.
Don’t worry about getting out early to beat the rush. Whatever time you arrive, trash will be there. Take your time, enjoy. And don’t miss the gardens. A lot of the prettiest horticultural work in the city is in backyards visible only from the alley.
