glitter stucco & dumpster diving

reflections on building production

in the vernacular city

.JOHN CHASE

\'E~SO

New York· London

NA'730.CZC '-1'220[)o

Ayt-

contents

preface ixacknowledgments xiii

PART ONETHE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HOME AS COMMODITY

the stucco box (with John Beach) 3

build your castle upon the trashthe making of mountaingate 39

First Published by Verso in ;;l000Copyright © john Chase aoco

Ali rights reservedPART TWO

ILLUSION AND DELUSION IN LOS ANGELES

finding 105angeles in the movies,finding the movies in los angeles 51

how can i miss you when you won't go away?convention versus invention and the surviva!

of period revival in southern california 75

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1V }HRUSA: 180 varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books knocking oft the knock-ofts 103

nISI':;'" BY POLLEN

Printed by R,R. Donndley and Sons

ISBN 1-85984-807'9

PART THREE

LAS VEGAS

British library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalog record for this book is available from the British Library

pirates! volcanoes! neon!welcome to the capitol of non-glamour!

(lNith Frances Anderton) 117Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of CongreSS

trashy space,

trashy people

and trashy behavior01,

The true language oj cities deals with relationships rather than free-standing objects.

-Grady Clay, How to Read the American City

trash at the office

Where there is trash, there is life, rotten though it may be. One weekend Iarrived at the offices Ishare with friends to find that a sociopathic therapist hadmade a major deposit inour dumpster. Itwas all too easy to reconstruct the trailof sorrow this Casanova had trodden. Among his psychojunk were lettersfrom the female clients he had romanced and slept with. You could see whythey would have been especially vengeful from the other supporting evidencehe had left behind. There was a huge, almost competently done water color ofa benevolent New Agey angel, radiating healing and forgiveness.

This simultaneously healing and wounding counselor had also leftbehind a stack of dubious self-help books: babbling tomes on putting the sex-ual magic back into your marriage, manuals detailing how many scoops ofice cream to give to yow inner child. Part of me felt that a call to the Statelicensing board was in order. Another part of me worried that this therapistwas a veritable Chernobyl of bad karma. Idid not want so much as one scin-tilla of it rubbing off on me.

'II

..I I strongly SUS~~c!mj evil nBighbDItwo dD~fSdown ~I a~andO"ing

aM then torching ~i!skelet.1 Christmas tree in the alley iU~1toan~oi eierv~ne.

174 trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior

It seemed wiser to let the orphaned evidence be hauled off to the bucol-ic, oak-tree-studded canyon at the edge of the San Fernando Valley that our

waste disposal finn is despoiling by filling with trash. At any rate, J was sure

one of the many outraged women (shockingly, the letters were from not one

or two patients but many. many patients) had surely taken matters into herown hands. One could only hope that Mr. Wonderful would soon be selling

shoes or peddling insurance in another state, no longer able to pass out love

joneses like Halloween candy. At any rate, trash showed itself as a supplemedium for the recording of human behavior.

Since nearly all possessions ultimately end up as trash, the trash universeis virtually infinite as a topic. Rather than take on the whole dumpster, so to

speak, r am going to confine my remarks to trash as geographical marker,

trash as barter and livelihood and trash as symbol. These are my trash terri-tories of choice.

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To control trash is to strike a symbolic blow at entropy. J learned this frommy parents early in life. From my mother t leamed that having candlesticksthat matched the place settings meant one had conquered all. From myfather I learned the fine points of trash management. Pop selected all of hispleasures and his worries carefully. They tended to be capable of beingaddressed through direct action, whether that was purchasing the pickledpigs feet he loved or getting up early to meet the trash men. The trash men,as I understood them in my childhood, were part of the army of black andbrown service workers who swanned to white, upper-middle-class suburbsin Southern California to renew the gloss on utopia, ensuring that floorsshone, that beds had fresh linen. that lawns were properly fertilized. WhenI was a child J hated the fact that Pop would question the "inevitabilityandcompleteness of these arrangements, privileged arrangements that J waseager to take for granted as base conditions for existence.

If a trash pickup looked dicey to Pop, ifhe knew full well, in his steward-ship of T4lO Milan Avenue, that the trash exceeded the capacities of theranks of metal and vinyl containers in the service yard, he would squirrelaway the overflow until the time was right. Part of the problem was theunending flow of suburban agriculmral product, the mountains of clippingsgenerated by the expanses oflawn. hedge and leaf-dropping trees. Beforetheera of recycling clippings. the suburbs were farms growing a crop harvest-ed strictly for trash. Even before they reached the cans, these pyramids oflawn clippings would start to heat up, fired up by decomposition.

At the end of ills life his concern with order increased. Pop asked for verylittle of the world; for him, self-interest came down to a concern that you behappy. It was a matter of honor, however, that bills be paid and obligationsdischarged. I would sometimes arrive at my father's house to find it awash

trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior 175

Trash is disorder personified; it offers horrific proof that wanted posses-sions are all potential changelings, that even the most benign objects andactivitieshave a fecal underbelly. A lush landscape becomes lawn clippings,a feast becomes bones, a cupidlike infant produces soiled Pampers.

trash at home

IIII

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Tenement 911 rear door iignelte after a December rain.

II

176 trashy Space, trashy people and trashy behavior

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in tangled paper trails of decades ofbi1ls~tax filings and personal papers. Hewould spread these across the living room in much the same way that mymother, in the middle of an uncontrollable manic-depressive high, had ear-lier covered the living room with pictures of my sister and myself at all ages.

If the household interior was out of control at least the trash could be con-trolled the universe. Having kept a particularly vigilant eye on the contentsof the trash, Pop would spend days in advance fretting about the strategy forits removal. This strategy usually involved my father materializing at just theright moment with the correct folding green for the garbage men.

trash and i

My father's obsession with the choreography of trash removal annoyed meto no end. From my perspective. it was clearly not a fit subject with which;grown man should concern himself. Naturally that meant that I soon founmyself just as compulsive on the subject as he was, if not more so. At somepoint in my thirties, I developed the nervous tic of kicking crushed cigarettewrappers and crumpled beer cans into the gutter. To this day it takes a cer-tain amount of will power for me to walk past a tempting pile of old news-

trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior 177

papers laying on the sidewalk and not give them a good swift boot. It ishumbling to realize that in some primitive, and apparently quite extensive,part of my brain, I somehow think I am making the world a better place witheach carefully aimed kick. Walking away from a garbage kick, the ur-mam-mal within is persuading me that now that I have made my offering, themajestic, slow-moving street-sweeper gods will come in the dead of night tosweep away the detritus and purify the site. It also stems, in part, from thefascination J had as a kid, throwing papers, leaves and bugs in a streaminggutter during a good, hard winter rain and watching them rush off on theirstorm-drain journey to the ocean.

trashy neighborhoods one: echo park

Once, as an adult, while I was babysitting a cavernous. old brick building inthe nether zone of Sunset Boulevard that lies between gilverlake and EchoPark. I nearly got busted for kicking trash in the gutter. That building was alittlelike an armed frontier fort against the dispossessed of the inner city whopassed through on their trek from the druggy depths of McArthur Park to theequally tough streets of downtown Hollywood. The parking lot the bushesbehind the building and the planter next to the building on Sunset all hadtheir habitues. For awhile the homeless were discreetly living in the upperreaches of the unused loft and raiding the office refrigerator at night, whilein the planter outside, a porky guy with long, spiky locks would bang out hisown version ofvlust like a Woman" on guitar. His version, "Just like a Pig,"

included a spellbinding chorus of oinks.As caretaker of someone else's building, I felt it was my duty to dust ofT

the debris from the planter. 50 I was ticked off when the neighborhoodwatermelon vender moved his site of operations in front of the building.Satisfied clients left rinds galore on the sidewalk and planter. My approachto starting an open dialogue between reasonable people was to kick thoserinds (the larger ones had to be shoveled by hand) into the gutter while curs-ing vigorously. One day, while in mid-curse and mid-kick I was halted by amotorcycle cop who swooped around the comer. I had to haul every last rindout of the gutter while the vendor watched -.Humiliating,

,

III

Cill JDUrbread upon the asphalt: I WJnder 00 more: I Ratherpig!on feed.

178 trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior

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The motorcycle cop was a regular visitor to our parking lot, where,because OUf bUilding created a blind comer. he could lie in wait He'd zoomright past the super-dirty boozer who was habitually flat on his back next tothe dumpster.

I have been known to climb into a dumpster. At myoid office in. ofSilverlake, I often seemed to have filed some vitally important piece

paper in the waste basket. Invariably, upon recovery, it would have become

tangled up with the true detritus. Unsolicited donations regularly left thedumpster awash in an unappetizing mix of beer bottles, gutted limes andbloody dental casts.

r would scramble from the commodious recesses of the dumpster fum-ing because of these deposits, contributed by the neighborhood dentists and

by the Latino bar across the street. The bar featured high-heeled, micro-

trashy neighborhoods three: venice

trashy space. trashy people and trashy behavior 179

mini-encased B-girls and a curbside roach-coach vending camitas and tacosas its twin attractions. But all attempts to bring the Silverlake dumpster mis-

creants to justice were in vain.

trashy neighborhoods two: silverlake

J took the daily tides of the trash ecosystem even more personally when Imoved into my house on Ethelyne Street in Silverlake. Every day a new deposit

of flotsam and jetsam would wash up from the flow of auto and pedestriantraffic. One day it would be the endless strands of broken cassette tapes, the

next day the unwanted portions of multiple McDonald's Happy Meals. Eachday brought with ita new sunrise. a new edition of the morning paper and a

new scattering of bottles, cans and candy wrappers. Sometimes there weresurprises, like the almost functioning engine left over from a curbside car

repair, or the discarded "lifelike Sex Toy" large enough to deserve a liabilitydisclaimer. Unless I went out there each day to litter-pick, the front yard

would end up looking like Woodstock the morning after.When r bought the house, the yard still bore the last signs of the neigh-

borhood's former identity as a locus for the party times of the late '70S and

the early '80S that had receded in the face of the onslaught of AIDS. The for-mer gay bar around the corner had become an AIDS service center. The

notorious SjM bar at the bottom of Ethylene was now a neighborhood Latinochurch. I probably cleared a gallon bucket's worthoflittle, amber-brown bot-

tles from the front yard, bottles that had been filled with amyl nitrate inhalantand used as aphrodisiacs for plein air frolicking. Itmade me wonder if there

used to be a whole lot more bushes in the front yard.

Once I moved to Venice I was no longer the King of Trash. That title, on mynew block, clearly belongs to Butch, a white-bearded former coal miner withmost, but not all, of the teeth with which he was born. Butch rules the roost

180 trashy space. trashy people and trashy behavior

!II

as manager of the building next door, whose dumpster I have an excellentview of from my dining room window I have watched Butch finesse thetrash to a fare-thee-well. The man is not above climbing into the bin andjumping up and down on the trash to squash it flat enough for the dumpsterlid to close.

He always narrows his eyes when he curses the local fish restaurant,whose workers keep sneaking their reeking offal into the container. Twicedaily, when Butch takes his supervisory constitutional around the blockwithhis wife's vicious little Chihuahua, the dumpster lid is lifted and the contentsare inspected for suspect, nontenement material. Woe betide the one whoappropriates space for alien trash in that dumpster. Butch's managementpolicy for the dumpster is, first, to immediately return the foreign items totheir presumed owner (I know from personal experience that he doesn'talways guess correctly, since he has mistakenly assumed that I was the felonin question more than once) and second. to ferret out any possible items ofvalue that he himself or his tenants might need. There are times when Butchnabs the recyclable items out of the bin, though whether he sorts them tosupplement his beer fund or simply to preventalleyites from profiting fromthe loot I have not yet established.

It's natural for anyone who lives, as I do now, on an alley in Venice to beobsessed with trash. The alleys of Venice are a aq-hour open-air market forthe deposit, the sorting. the trading in and the removal of refuse. Those whohave fallen on hard times know that the alleys of Venice are paved with sodapop bottles and cardboard. These transactions are fostered by legislationdesigned to encourage recycling. Cans. bottles and paper products bring cashwhen traded in-not very much cash. but just enough help with the needs ofthe homeless and the poor, and often just enough to buy more booze or moredrugs. Some trash can raiders specialize only in slips of paper with credit cardaccount numbers, valuable data that can be fenced on Oceanfront Walk.

Trash-trading thrives here more so than most other places in SouthernCalifornia because of the famous live-and-let-Iiveattitudes of Venetians andthe shelter offered by the beach. The sand here gives displaced people some-where to live with more dignity and style than is possible in many otherneighborhoods in LosAngeles. Day and night the rumble of shopping cartsand the jingle-jangle of the tin cans they contain is heard inMilton Court alley,located between my building and the Rose of Sharon Manor on RoseAvenue.

trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior 181

me Rose of Sharon Manor is a two-story. covered-parking vintage 1974building in a developer schlock-Mediterranean style. The stylistic overlayconsists of a "Spanish lace" stucco finish, like the left-over epoxy when youtake up linoleum, and a few claytiles, throw in some aluminum slider win-dows and call it a day. Loathsome. Located to the north of my building it hasa great view across Milton Court into my bedroom.

Tonight at seven o'clock, in the open garage of the Manor 25feet from myhouse, four bedrolls will appear. The people who sleep on them will proba-blybe the fifth or sixth generation of transient residents in the garage spacesince r moved here two years ago.

The drawing card for any back-alley forager is its trash containers. Thetenement next door has a capacious dumpster while the Manor just hastrash cans. The dumpster is the foraging receptacle of choice far alleyitessince its size makes going through a large volume of trash easier. Dumpstershold greater promise oflarger and varied treasures than do mere trash cans.On the other hand, the Manor has the advantage of a roof over its trash cansin the form of covered, head-in parking. For the alleyites. this parking areahas been the spot to take a leak, hang out, argue, drink, do drugs, changeclothes and sleep at night. Lodging comes in the form of a two-and-a-half.foot wide, six-foot high concrete platform at the back of the garage. It is justlow enough to allow clearance between a snoozing guest and the carbumpers that extend into the space. The longest term nighttime denizen ofthe garage was a broken-looking women with long dark hair, who swept upafter herself every morning.

If I ever needed a reminder that not everyone has access to shelter whoneeds or wants it, all I had to do was to listen for her hacking, tubercularcough. Many of the homeless are out on the street mentally illor alcohol anddrug addicted thanks to cutbacks in California's social services. The Manormanagement (consisting of an elderly woman and her elderly Dalmatian,along with the personnel of the bootleg repair service that the landlord runsout of the basement) tends to leave the homeless alone.

At one point a homeless man was living in one of the left-over storagespaces under the stairs at my house until I put my stuffln the space and pad-locked the door. At the time 1had no idea I was sharing the house with him.

For about a year another homeless man. a mean drunk who accostedpassersby and swore at them, lived in a derelict cottage that sits at the comer

'I

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Too IWIJconQuering v~hjcles of alterdnm the dumpster and tileshopping carl,

182 trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior

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ofLittle Center Street and Milton Court, on the other side of my neighbor's

driveway. Mean Drunk's speciality was to stand in the middle of OceanAvenue and stick his arrn out so that passing cars would have to move out

of the way. Butch saw him get hit once. The accident broke Mean Drunk's

ann. The motorist freaked out, but the impassive Butch sent him on his way,

explaining to the guy that he was not responsible for the fact that old M D.liked to playa high-stakes game of chicken by lunging at passing cars.

Later M,n.'s cottage was taken over by someone r call Prince Val, a formerdweller of the tenement. Butch arranged a special low-rent deal between Valand the landlord. Since the house was filled with junk Prince V. solved the

problem by dumping it, load by load in various locations. Piles of it would

appear overnight in the public parking lot at the corner, in front ofhis oldtenement or stuffed into my garbage cans.

One of the low points in alley trashology was when Val put his Christmastree out in the alley and set it on fire.

The alley has a human ecology of its own. Any vacuum is quickly fllied.

The current Occupants of the garage happen to be meticulous. They arrive

trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior 183

and depart at set hours. They have no shopping carts, and they do not leavelarge piles of possessions behind when they are not there. Nor do they havelarge crowds of hangers-on. For all practical purposes the garage might aswell be a hotel room with a printed set of rules and a check-out time postedon the door. They limit their signs of occupation and their transgressions ofprivate space in order not to jeopardize their right to continued night stays.

All of the alley nomads have not been such assiduous charm-schoolscholars, however. One seal)', extra-tall guy (I would swear seven feet, easy)used to beat the crap out of his girlfriend in the alley, and, yes, we did call thecops when he did that. Many garage inmates brought in trash to sort fromother places and ripped open and tossed out the contents of the assembledranks of trash cans, thereby creating a cozy trash nest for themselves. As asleep aid some of the inmates would partake of a little nightcap, shooting up,without always bothering to remove the syringe from their arms, beforedrifting off to slumberland.

The alley recyclers are there for economic reasons. The alley space functionsas public space in the truest sense of the word-no one is excluded. The home-less who sleep in the garage across from me are just as much residents of thealley as I for whatever time they remain there, since for the nights they sleepthere they are no less dear about where they are sleeping or what space they areinhabiting than I. like sea gulls trailing a fishing ship, the garbage sorters fill thealley in greatest numbers just before the arrival of the city trash trucks onTuesday mornings because the pickings are best then. At its high-water mark,the public space of the alley spreads to the parking lot of the tenement next door.

At other hours, on other days, the alley becomes the purview ofbeachgoersroller-blading, bicycling or walking, taking a shortcut to the beach. This use ofspace is determined by the weather: the hotter and sunnier the day, the greaterthe numbers of surf-seekers. At still other times the combination janitorial staffand hot appliance-repair business takes possession of the area.

During some periods, the alley has been dominated by rent-paying ten-ants of the Rose of Sharon Manor across the alley, in the short-lived honey-moon period of their initial occupancy. For a few weeks the happy newManorites, flush with pride at their success in having scored beachside digs,brave the inhospitable alley environment. Against all reason and commonsense, they actually use their balconies, water their plants and talk on thephone outdoors.

184 trashy space. trashy people and trashy behavior

I give them six months, maximum, before they give up and move.Ieav-ing the blank sliding-glass doors and white-box interiors of their apartmentsbehind. The alley always wins.

official trash

In my alleyas elsewhere in this vast metropolis, the effects can be felt of theCity ofLos Angeles' elaborate, officially sanctioned recycling program. Theprogram comes complete with specially engineered but temperamentalgarbage trucks that occasionally come apart and kill hapless motorists, trashbins to fit the trucks and little plastic recycling containers for the more pre-cious cargoes of metal and glass. Each of the garbage cans is individuallynumbered. a marvel of obsessive bureaucratic thinking.

Crack cocaine may be sold with impunity on the streets of LosAngeles,andvast disparities may exist in educational, social and professional opportunitybetweendifferent neighborhoods and demographic groups. Yetsomewhere thebureaucratic geniuses who came up with this brazenly utopian idea are con-tentedly counting their rnunbered trash cans being flung into the dumpstertrucks, like sheep jumping a rail, as they settle into a deep, happy slumber.

In a sense, being issued pedigreed trash cans seems entirely un-American. It's as though Los Angelenos couldn't be trusted with their per-sonal and household hygiene and had to be issued official toilet brushes,dental floss and clean underwear. Byrequiring that the trash cans be placedin the street, the trashnocrats have eliminated tens of thousands of parkingspaces at one fell swoop, altering the delicate parking ecosystem in neigh-borhoods across the city without the slightest thought to where the cars dis-placed by the officially placed containers are supposed to go.

The new trash cans are made of a soulless. black-brown plastic, their styl-istic inspiration perhaps the Ford Taurus, as though they had been sculpt-ed to symbolize low wind-resistance, meant to be envisioned speeding fastenough to break the sound barrier. The regimented rows of regulation-issuegarbage cans lack the sangfroid of the traditional rubbish containers theyhave replaced. It is difficult to imagine properly unkempt alley cats sitting ontop of them yowling at the full moon. If you've seen one official City of LosAngeles-issue trash can, you've seen them all.

trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior 185

In real life much of this elaborate civic infrastructure designed toaccommodate trash is simply ignored. Recycling in Venice is not done bythe city. There is nothing left to recycle by the time the city trucks arrive.The bright-yellow, plastic recycling bins have been scoured clean bysquadrons of can, and bottle pickers. The recycling program is exemplaryof the ways in which government officials and the public increasinglydemand a perfect world that will not harm anyone in any conceivable wayunder any conceivable scenario. It is a perfection so demanding of ordi.nary citizens in the pursuit of ordinary tasks that most of us simply ignorethe perfect rules altogether. Thus the political bureaucracy of trash and thebarter economy of trash coexist. side by side.

the economy of trash

The trash of Venice is a medium of exchange between income groups. Itacts as a privatized form of welfare. More often than not, Venetians whohave decided that the time has come to part ways with a garment lay itdown gently on top of a trash container. They may even go to considerableeffort to display their offerings enticingly, freshly laundered, folded andpressed. Once upon a time these cast-off garments might have been fer-ried to a thrift store, but my neighbor now believes that she is being a goodSamaritan when she places these offerings on top of my trash can. To me,this placing of charitable offerings is a breach of my territorial rights anda subsidy of the alternative alley economy that I do not appreciate. Hurlingher offerings into the depths of my trash can gives me a momentary senseof control.

When a housed alleyite neatly lines up a row of empty bottles against awall or carefully folds a newly laundered but worn blanket on top of, but notin, the garbage can he or she becomes part of a transaction in which some-thing that no longer has value to one economic class becomes valuable allover again to another economic class. The excess or unwanted remnants ofthe housed alleyitesbecome the life blood of the nomadic alleyites. It is a CUf·

rency exchange created by a slight geographical repositioning of the currencyin question: i.e., rubbish and castoffs. Transference outside the cell wall ofthe dwelling releases this currency into the veins of the alley economy.

As tile sun sets ~V8r the PBcilicjust lJeiow the palm tree. cheer.lui. whistling alleyite rummages through a dumpster

186 lr",shy Space, trashy people and trashy behavior

From time to time, alleyites attempt to find new uses for found objects. One

midwinter day, at dusk, I arrived home to find an alley gypsy intently refash-ioning a large, periwinkle-blue ceramic vase. He was pounding the vase on the

tarmac, methodically knocking offfragments of its lip. As he worked he wouldstop and hold up the vase to appraise its progress. When he was throughremoving the lip, he began to rotate the vase on the pavement, attempting to

grind off the now vestigial remains of the lip. He must have judged the finalproduct a failure, for he left it sitting there in the tenement parking lot.

the territory of trash

The deposit of trash is a territorial power grab. If someone leaves trash in alocation he or she lays claim to that location in the same way that an animal

does by leaving its scent along a trail. If someone throws a bottle over myfence just after he or she has polished off the last of a Brew 102 or bottle of

Ripple, that person has made a claim on my yard. By the time there are sub-

stantial amounts of wrappers, newspapers and other debris swirling aroundmy yard I have begun to lose control of that territory.

trashy space. trashy people and trashy behavior 187

At one point, when the tenement harbored its party-eartiest crew, therewas not much difference between the trash crop! had to contend with inSilverlake and the harvest! was finding on my doorstep at the beach. Party ring-leader Ed would chain his bike and those of his mends through my chain-linkfence so that the handlebars stuck about six inches, into my walkway at the bor-der of my property. This and the trash that spilled out of Ed's basket and blewunder the fence onto what I will charitably call my lawn-s-made me mad.

One day, when! was in a bad mood, ! snapped.! walked next door, grabbedthe bike and shook it as hard as I could, so that all of the crushed cans fell out.I shouted up at his window. "Don't chain your Goddamn bike through thefence!" What really made me mad is that he had clipped a hole the size of a can-taloupe through the chain link in order to put the chain through. Chain link hasbeen a sore point "lith me dating back to my EtheIyne Avenue house. Its chainlink fence eventually fell over because the neighborhood kids played on it somuch and the neighbors' cars ran into it so often.

Trash is a visible record of occupation in the alley, where greater garbage-can pilfering and greater numbers of homeless leave behind greateramounts of trash, as well as a predictor of the activity level in the near futureby the alley gypsies. The presence or absence of large amounts of trash is aclear sign of what kind of social order is prevailing at that time. The momentswhen the alley seems an urban dystopia. adrift in overturned cans and over-flowing shopping carts, are precisely the moments when the gypsy alleyitepopulation grows largest and most active.

Along the alley, house and yard are recognized by all as zones of privatizeddomesticity. Placing items in the alley transforms them from off-limits, as partofthe household, to fur game for the alley public at large. The edges where privatespace meets the alley are sometimes defined by small architectural elements-aset of two or three steps, a stub ofhalf-heightwall or an overhanging balcony.

But these boundaries are sttuational. An unlocked yard with no trashcans is likely to remain untouched by outsiders for years at a time, even ifitholds a relatively transportable item of some minimal value, such as a BigWheels tricycle. Placement of a trash can within that yard changes theequa-tion, making it far more likely that alley nomads will violate the privatizedspace, compelled by the need to sift through the trash for recyclable prizes.Any space that functions as an adjunct part of the alley because of the pres-

ence of trash may become de facto public space.

188 trashy space, trashy people and trashy behavior

Because the alley space is not officially defined, surveilled or regulated, ille-gal activities inevitably occur there. Sometimes the alley space is used as alatrine, sometimes not. There are waves of public drug use, and then the druguse dies down, During the tail end of the tenement's wild times, the space ofthe alley became a kind of annex to the building. There have been instances oftheft in the alley, especially from the trucks of workmen who have tool chestsor bicycles locked to them. The alley's asphalt paving is often dusted with theemerald crumbs of auto windows shattered from break-ins.

There were a few times over a period of several months when r would bounddown the steps from my house to the alley to find a virtual convention of shop-ping carts. A selection of purloined and salvaged wares would be laid out in frontof my garage door surrounded by a crowd of appraising alleyites, the alleycoun-terpart of a gaggle of suburban shoppers comparing notes at a yard sale.

The two categories of residents, alleyites and non-alleyites. are not mutu-ally exclusive. In the space of the alley, mediation between economic castesand between legal and illegal activities occur. There are housed recyclers,homeless recyclers and homeless who do not recycle. Of the homeless someare drug addicts and some are not. Of the drug addicts some are homelessand some are not. Individuals fall into different categories at different timesin their lives. Venice is not a place where boundaries are always clear, wherecategories are set in stone.

Sometimes the gypsies carouse with the tenement dwellers in the alley;at other times they sleep with the tenement dwellers in their rooms. Thereare also fleeting networks of association among the people who live in thehouses and apartments that face the alley-associations that sometimesinclude the alley gypsies.

The alley space is not a static topography so much as it is an social tidalzone, in which those with less privilege and less legal and financial buttressfor their right to be there float through more quickly than those who havemore assurance in these matters.

In that liquid rhythm of the alley as shifting private/public space, trash isone of the elements that mark the narrative history and uses of the space. Inthat sense trash isn't really "thrown away" so much as transformed in itsrole. Like it or not, the discards continue to have value as determinants ofbehavior and symbols of territorial occupation.