How a retired New York City garbage man collected 45,000 ‘treasures in the trash’

“Sometimes I can tell just by looking at the bag, sometimes I pick up the bag and I hear something inside,” says Nelson Molina. “Or sometimes the weight of the bag [gives it away].” If you gave him three months to look through trash, Molina is confident he could “furnish a three bedroom apartment.” The retired sanitation worker, who spent over three decades working for the city of New York, has amassed a collection of over 45,000 items rescued from the trash. Hundreds of tables fill a room in Garage 11, on the Upper East Side of New York City. Each table is devoted to a certain collection: Vintage cameras, typewriters, stuffed animals, watches, baseballs, newspaper clippings. There’s even a whole section devoted to Mona Lisas. None of it seems haphazard and most displays were built over years, as Molina painstakingly searched through god only knows how much trash to find the perfect pieces. In tribute to that oft-recited quote, he called the massive exhibit “Treasures in the Trash.”