Vicki Rovere's curbside items are salvaged from the garbage piles of the Lower East Side. erinreiss reports on the 78-year-old operator of the Ludlow Street Free Store
Vicki surrounded by her books and the things she’s collected from the trash.On a Thursday night, Lauren Gold, a cashier at the Trader Joe’s on the Lower East Side, picked up a black ceramic electric cooking pot with a glass lid from a battered stoop on Ludlow Street. “I walk to work a different way every day, but on my way home I always come up Ludlow to see what’s out,” she says. “Some days it’s a gold mine.” The 67-year-old has been making this trek for more than two years.
A recent knee injury and poor circulation in her left leg means she takes it slow going back up to her apartment, where she has lived for 49 years. “You would not know it from looking at me now, but my official adult height is five-foot-ten,” she says. “I’m now something like five-foot-six.” She’s pretty sure she knows why: “The only thing I can think of is carrying bags on my shoulders all these years and going up the stairs with them.” But then she laughs it off. “It’s not really a problem.
But her near-daily practice of rescuing garbage from the streets has overwhelmed her ability to store it. Four years ago, when I first visited Vicki’s home, tote bags of salvaged cast-offs were stacked around the apartment — they were organized by the type of object: kitchenware, shoes, drugstore items, hardware and electronics, pet care, toys and games, and so on. Once a bag had acquired critical mass , it was brought down to the free store.
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