The apartment allegedly wanted to quickly remove all of the woman’s belongings so it could put her unit back on the market for millions
Pedestrians tried to salvage a woman’s designer clothes, furniture, instruments, and paintings after a Manhattan co-op building allegedly decided to throw all of her belongings onto the street after she passed away.
An elderly artist named Diane Greene had lived for years in a luxury Upper West Side apartment building until her recent death, sustainability influencer Anna Sacks explained in a TikTok post this week.
Sacks speculated that Greene’s next-of-kin either didn’t want her belongings or wasn’t available to salvage them.
She claims the apartment owners wanted to remove all of Greene’s belongings as fast as possible so they could renovate it and put it back onto the market for millions of dollars.
So instead of organizing a sale or auction , the apartment instead placed Greene’s possessions — including an antique Singer sewing machine, 19th-century paintings, brand-new bone china, and even a piano — into black trash bags and laid them out on the street.
“It’s a really intimate experience to go through the contents of a person’s life,” Sacks said in the video.
“I went over the course of multiple days and took as much as I could rescue, but so much went to the trash and it’s really a tragedy.”
Sacks didn’t specify which items she took home, but her video shows her trying on some of Greene’s colorful embroidered clothes and picking up wooden antiques and an unopened bottle of champagne.
“She had beautiful items, beautiful taste, and to me, it’s also about honoring a person’s life, that their legacy not be discarded,” Greene said.
Many commenters expressed their frustration that some of Greene’s one-of-a-kind items would inevitably end up in the trash.
Sacks suggested that lawmakers could pass a bill that would require buildings to attempt to sell or donate a former resident’s belongings before throwing them out.
Sacks has amassed nearly 425,000 followers on her ” thetrashwalker ” TikTok account, where she chronicles her adventures “rescuing” items that were otherwise destined for the landfill.