This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
NEW YORK CITY — Between 59th and 96th Street on the Upper East Side, Nelson Molina learned that New York is, at its core, a city of obscene and involuntary generosity. In a neighborhood where buildings have doormen in white gloves and dogs wear coats in winter, people throw things away unopened. Bed sheets still in their packaging, televisions, and complete kitchen sets. Once, Molina found a set of leather suitcases stacked on the sidewalk, as if someone had decided, all at once, to never travel again.
For 34 years, Nelson worked as a sanitation worker for New York City — and he learned early on that he actually had two jobs: the one the city paid him for, and the one he gave himself. “If I find it on the street, someone can always use it,” he says. While his fellow workers saw bags and waste, he saw an electric guitar that still worked, an intact porcelain vase, or a family portrait that just needed a nail on a wall.
Molina was born in East Harlem in 1953 and grew up in the Jefferson Houses, just blocks from the garage where, decades later, he would store his treasures. He joined the Department of Sanitation on July 6, 1981 — a date he remembers as his own birthday — and knew from day one that the job was a perfect fit.
His mother taught him almost everything. “She never threw anything away,” he recalls. “If she could fix it, she fixed it. And if she couldn’t fix it, nobody could.” Nelson is the third of six siblings, and he was nine years old when that logic took hold of him for good. Before Christmas, he would go out looking for broken toys, repair them, and give them to his brothers and sisters. “To them, I was like Santa Claus. Every time I left, they knew I was coming back with something.” So when he started working and saw the sheer volume of perfectly useful things discarded every day across Manhattan, he didn’t hesitate. He set them aside, stored them, fixed them and, without meaning to, started building something…