Honestly, seeing people find out in the wild that New York City has giant mounds of trash bags ten feet high along every sidewalk in the city three or four times a week is one of the great pleasures of the internet. Yes, the entire city. Every trash day. Looks like this. For real, not a joke.
It's actually much worse downtown, which was largely built out before zoning laws existed, and so you get entire streets that are perpetually in shadow because of the skyscrapers all around with no setbacks. So you'll have puddles of greenish-brown "water" in the streets that never evaporate.
I'm specifically thinking of Exchange Place between Broad Street and William Street, which perpetually smells like piss, 24/7, because it never receives even a tiny bit of sunlight on any stretch of it. It also opens out directly onto the New York Stock Exchange, so it gets a lot of tourists.
Careful, you'll get all of the "NYC is the perfect model for the rest of the world" folks on your case, like the last time I offered anything but effusive praise of the Rotten Apple.
