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Ignoring complaints, NYC Parks stinks up Bronx green space with unofficial trash dump
By
Liam Quigley
Published Aug 13, 2025
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Liam Quigley
By
Liam Quigley
Published Aug 13, 2025
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The parks department has used a city-owned Bronx lot as an unofficial garbage dump for decades, and locals say the stench has grown so horrendous it’s made a nearby greenway all but unbearable to traverse.
The trash mountain occupies the southern end of the parks department’s Bronx headquarters, which is named Ranaqua, meaning “End Place” in Reckgawank Algonquin. The facility is nestled between the Bronx River Greenway, the Bronx Zoo monorail and the MTA’s East 180th Street subway yard.
City officials said the department has used the lot as an area to store garbage collected from all the borough’s parks since at least the early 2000s. The waste is taken there before it's picked up by garbage trucks. But it often sits out in the sun long enough to visibly rot. On a recent afternoon, flies were teeming over spoiled food in the pile, which was also filled with old mattresses, destroyed mopeds and other rancid detritus.
The parks department has turned a parking lot at its Bronx headquarters into an unofficial garbage dump.
Liam Quigley
The pile is also filled with rat burrows, and its smell on a hot day is strong and foul enough to make some passersby on the adjacent greenway gag. It’s turned an idyllic Bronx greenspace into a blighted area abutted by what’s essentially an unregulated waste transfer station.
Several neighbors said they keep filing 311 complaints about the dump, which are ignored by city agencies. The problem subverts Mayor Eric Adams’ “war on rats,” which centers around getting mountains of trash bags out of the city’s public spaces and into containers.
“It makes me so angry,” said Amelia Theodoradus, who lives near the stinky lot. “We’re a neighborhood of immigrants and city workers and mainly people of color who work really, really hard… It’s just not a high-value neighborhood to whatever planning is going on.”
Theodoradus said she’s filed at least 10 complaints about the lot over the last two years, which haven’t led to any action from the city.
Parks department officials said the trash pile operation is necessary to handle the extensive amount of refuse collected from the Bronx’s parks.
Officials say the garbage comes from parks all over the Bronx that can’t easily be collected by regular garbage trucks. Officials said that parks workers in the borough removed as much as 227 tons of waste in a single week last month, and that they try to keep the garbage from piling up in the lot for too long.
“NYC Parks is committed to keeping our city's parks clean, safe, and attractive for all New Yorkers,” parks department spokesperson Judd Faulkner wrote in a statement. “The site at Ranaqua is cleared daily and we will work to have the area cleared as soon as possible.”
Mattresses, old street signs and busted shopping carts are just a few of the items one can find in the parks department's makeshift garbage dump in the Bronx.
Liam Quigley
While officials said the site is cleared regularly, Theodoradus said the mountain has fostered so much rat activity that she steers clear of the nearby greenway after dusk.
“There are little rat dens with lots of holes and rats running in and out of them. Once, one ran over my foot and I freaked out,” she said.
On some days, the putrid pile grows so large it bulges against the fence dividing the park's property from the greenway, with bags of trash lurching menacingly over passing cyclists.
“Driving through it one way I'm going downhill, so I don't exactly catch the whiff of the smell. The other way, it's unbearable,” said Richardson Hernandez, who cycles the path regularly and tries to pass the stinky section near the dumping ground as quickly as possible.
Parks officials said the agency has 112 garbage trucks, with 22 assigned to the Bronx, but that the garbage dump is a temporary solution to store garbage that can’t be picked up by the regular garbage trucks. Representatives from the department did not say exactly how long the lot has been used as a dump.
Tagged
bronx
new york city
sanitation
Liam Quigley
Liam Quigley is a reporter covering parks & sanitation for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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