By Helen Klein
Bright yellow clothing collection boxes are causing some Canarsie residents to see red. At the January meeting of the United Canarsie South Civic Association (UCSCA), which was held at the Hebrew Educational Society (HES), 9602 Seaview Avenue, the issue was mooted about. Alan Maisel, representing the New York State Assembly, said that, “Yellow clothing bins seem to be popping up in Canarsie. About two months ago, I tried to get rid of one at East 82nd Street off Flatlands Avenue. The bin just appeared overnight. I spoke to the owner of the property and he told me he never authorized it. I asked him if he could call them up to get rid of it, but I don’t think he really cared one way or the other. It was the people on the block who cared.” Charlie Zambrana, UCSCA’s quality of life guru, pointed out that two of the boxes, labeled Hands of Faith, had been deposited in the area on December 31st around 2 a.m. “There is one diagonally across the street from my house,” he reported, “and another that was dumped in the Key Food shopping center. They pushed it out and now it’s behind the Pizza Hut.” Often, clothing deposited in such bins are not distributed to poor people, said Maisel. “They become rags, and are bagged and put into bales and shipped overseas,” he explained. This is not the first time such a problem has reared its head in Canarsie. “Years ago,” Zambrana recalled, “we had St. Vincent de Paul and the Police Athletic League. We had people going in there and taking stuff out.” Zambrana said he remembered one individual who would sort through the donations in the boxes, take the best, and sell them, hardly what the donors had intended. In addition, Maisel pointed out, “Fires get set in them.” Getting them removed, however, is not a slam dunk. “When I spoke to Sanitation, they told me they couldn’t move them till they got a complaint from the owners (of the property) unless they became a hazard,” recalled Zambrana. “I personally would like to see them gone before they become a nuisance.” A call to the phone number on the bins elicited a response from Michael Jones, who said he worked for Hands of Faith. He said that Hands of Faith has, “People who go out and get an agreement with people and have a contract” to put the bins down on private property. He said the organization currently had about 30 boxes, and that it had had about 80, but that many had been stolen – one way in which they ended up at unauthorized sites, according to Jones. “People steal your boxes and relocate them, and we don’t find them till people call and ask why we placed the boxes on their property,” he recounted. Jones said that clothing collected in the boxes, “Goes straight to four day cares. It helps people,” he contended.
