They’re taking out the trash at a glacial pace.
An 8-foot-high mountain of trash near Gracie Mansion finally got cleared Monday after The Post revealed neighbors’ anger that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home apparently got the white-glove treatment — but other unsightly snowy garbage piles still linger across the city.
The growing summits of hardened snow, plastic trash bags and other detritus remained more than a week after Winter Storm Fern blanketed the Big Apple with a foot of flakes that quickly turned to ice amid a potentially record-breaking deep freeze, Mamdani said.
“Sanitation is currently running about 24 hours behind on trash collection,” he said during an unrelated press conference at the city’s municipal building.
“I know that they are working with everything that they have to come up to speed and that will be a focus for us.”
The frustrating garbage collection delays had many New Yorkers trash-talking the city’s slow response, with Upper East Side residents particularly miffed as they looked at spotless sidewalks at Mamdani’s new home of Gracie Mansion.
The largest trash pile in the tony neighborhood — an 8-foot mound of black trash bags along 79th Street near pristine Carl Schurz Park, where the stately mayoral manse sits — was cleaned up by Monday.
But other offensive junk clumps remained, including one on East 88th Street that ignominiously graced The Post’s cover Monday — and had even grown taller overnight.
A 75-foot long row of trash bags rested outside apartment buildings along East 83rd Street near Second Avenue.
“We’re hoping they come today because we have a lot more piled up downstairs,” said Brian, a doorman.
A sanitation worker picking up recyclables along the block described confusion within the department.
“We don’t know what we’re picking up when we come in in the morning,” the worker said. “We set up for one thing at night and then the next morning they sent us out with a totally different job.”
Department of Sanitation officials said hundreds of collection trucks are running every 12-hour shift to catch up with the backlog.
“Given that the same Sanitation Workers who pick up trash have been clearing the foot of snow and ice that fell last Sunday, we are about one day behind on collection, and we ask for patience from New Yorkers while we catch up,” a DSNY spokesperson said in a statement.
“We are prioritizing trash and compost — the stuff that can smell — over recyclables, but we are picking up all streams, all across the city, just on a slight delay. Most New Yorkers will recall that this is standard practice during and after winter weather events; years ago, trash collection would have been outright paused for weeks after a storm like this, but today we are able to do some of both at the same time.”
— Additional reporting by Hannah Fierick and Nicole Rosenthal
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