Looking back on the 1986 DC 33 strike through the Daily News’ reviews of trash-disposal sites
The Marquis of Debris reviewed trash sites as if they were restaurants for rats.
Thirty-nine years ago to the day Tuesday, Philadelphia’s largest union for city workers went on their last major strike, resulting in, among other things, 45,000 tons of trash piling up in neighborhood disposal sites across its 20-day run. The Daily News handled it with humor, courtesy of the Marquis of Debris.
“This filth is a veritable monument to sloth and the 21st century,” the Marquis bellowed in one July 1986 column, published two days into that year’s garbage strike. “And such is the stuff that plagues are made of.”
The nom de plume of a People Paper columnist who will remain anonymous, the Marquis styled himself after an 18th-century aristocrat and was tasked with cracking the case of Philly’s trash-strewn streets. His column investigated tips from readers, and in his missives, he admonished “litterbugs” — one of the Marquis’ favorite terms — with haughty prose, often accompanied by a headshot that appears to be a painting of a Revolution-era nobleman.
While the column ran occasionally before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33 went on strike nearly 40 years ago, with the union’s 1986 walkout, the Marquis’ moment arrived. Across DC 33’s roughly three-week strike, he published several columns that at least obliquely dealt with the work stoppage and its effects on the city.
Among them was a July 14, 1986, column in which the Marquis, for some reason, ranked a number of the city’s makeshift disposal sites by their imagined appeal as restaurants to some of the city’s least-liked denizens — rats. Instead of stars, he rated the dumps by rodents, with a four-vermin rating denoting a “restaurant that a rat won’t want to miss.”
Taking the cake with a perfect four-rat score was a disposal site set up along 30th Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, which the Marquis described as among his “favorites since opening day.” City officials had considered closing it not only due to the amount of refuse dumped there, but also because Philadelphians tended to stack their garbage along its perimeter, giving it the illusion of being full.
Workers solved it, the Marquis wrote, by bringing in a snowplow and pushing the detritus inland.
“Fortunately, for our rat friends, the restaurant lives on, with the center now accessible and overflowing with the wonderfully smelly stuff,” he wrote.
Conversely, the worst restaurant — and, therefore, best-run disposal center — was on the east side of Verree Road north of Susquehanna Avenue. That site was so clean, according to the Marquis, that it was “hardly worth a visit” from any peckish rodents.
“The Marquis understands an aide to Mayor [Wilson] Goode has called the Verree Road site ‘the cleanest of the dumps,’” the columnist wrote. “A model dump, if you will.”
Readers, however, later admonished the Marquis for including only legal dump sites in his rat restaurant review roundup. In a brief column, he responded by saying that he had “better things to do with his time than traipse the grimy, shadowy corners of the civic terrain for illicit dumps.”
“You try combing the city’s clothiers for a wash-and-wear 18th-century wardrobe that needs changing four times a day,” he wrote. Ultimately, though, the Marquis found that illegal dumps were prevalent along State Road and Belfield Avenue, as well as under the I-95 underpass at Tacony and Comly Streets.
Those sites, he added, attracted “several rats for some post-twilight snacking,” but the Marquis did not officially rank or review them.
Now, with DC 33 on its first major strike since 1986, the city has once again set up garbage-drop off sites — over 60 in all. Officials have said that residents are being asked to bring up to eight bags of trash to the sites on their usual trash-collection day.
“This is extremely important,” Carlton Williams, director of the Philadelphia Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, said at a news conference Monday. “We cannot be overwhelmed with the amount of trash at each site by bringing it on any day.”
If we are, though, at least the rats will be in for a restaurant revival. All we’re missing is the Marquis.