A few years ago I saw a six story apartment building in Memphis that sat right beside the railroad tracks. Each apartment had a terrace. The garbage between the track and the building was about 5 feet high. People were just throwing it over the railing. I wonder what the people on the first floor think. And why does the city allow it?
When I was young and poor, right after college, I lived in a studio for a while in NYC with a college buddy. We were on the ground floor of a typical Upper East Side brownstone five story apartment building. The buiding had a central ventallation shaft with windows that opened onto it. It was about a 4x6 foot shaft, not very big.
Someone used to throw trash down out of their kitchen into the shaft. This was idiotic, and just meant that me and my roomate had to periodically go into the shaft and clean up all the garbage. Because they were coming from a ways up, the trash bags often broke, and worst of all they contained dirty diapers.
My room mate noticed that often there would be several bags come down at once, so when when he heard the fist one hit, he went and opened our kitchen window and looked up, and verified which apartment the garbage was coming from.
A few hour later we notice the couple and their baby leave for somewhere. My room mate, being a pretty good rock climber puts all the garbage in a couple of big trash bags, and climbs up to their window opening on the shaft. He proceeds to open the window, and goes inside. He then proceeds to throw their garbage all over their apartment.
When they came home they were irate, came and yelled at us, to which we just laughed and said "turn about is fair play". The landlord told us he laughed too, when they complained to him. Needless to say they never threw garbage down the air shaft again.