Michael Appleton for The New York Times
As the temperatures kept rising on Tuesday, so did the smell of the garbage, like this pile in Crotona Park North in the Bronx
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Just after a long three-day holiday weekend, in the middle of a scorching triple-digit afternoon on Tuesday, on a patch of sidewalk in Chinatown outside the seemingly wise Confucius Plaza at Bowery and Bayard Street, a pile of trash simmered in the New York sun.
As mounds of refuse go, this one was neither unusually tall nor unusually messy. At about five bags, it rose about two feet off the ground.
There were neatly tied bags of paper and cardboard recycling. Mysterious foodstuffs of unknown vintage spilled out onto the sidewalk.
A banana peel. A shriveled-up chunk of what may have once been a watermelon.
McDonald’s hamburger containers. Cigarette butts. A can of paint. Milk cartons.
On any other day, Mayumi Hosoi, who waited for a bus a few steps away, might not have even noticed the pile. But by midafternoon, the temperature had reached 103 in Central Park, and the heat that cooked people’s nerves and the city’s subway platforms roasted this mound of trash, and hundreds like it around New York City. Read more..
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