"Some Days It's a Gold Mine" – Vicki Rovere

One woman's quest to rescue the trash of the Lower East Side.

- By Aaron Reiss

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.” Over the next 20 minutes, an employee from a nearby taco spot came by on her break and selected two hammered copper Moscow Mule mugs from the steps. “I’m going to use them for ice cream,” she sheepishly tells me. A man in tattered clothing carrying a plastic cup filled with coins grabbed a deodorant stick and put it into his pocket. Two women in their mid20s wearing fedoras with skateboards tucked under their arms riffled through a stack of books and walked away with Japanese texts on anatomy and Buddhism. On the metal grate behind the books, the mugs, and a dozen other items spread out on a stoop hung a small handwritten sign taped to a clothes hanger: the ludlow street free store.

Most of the people picking up items or passing by will never meet Vicki Rovere, the 78-year-old who has run the free store for almost two decades. She starts setting up around 9 p.m. on any night it doesn’t rain, schlepping bags of salvaged goods from her small one-bedroom apartment down five flights and arranging them on the stoop. Plenty of New Yorkers put old toys or kitchenware out on the sidewalk, hoping that someone will find them useful. But most of Vicki’s curbside items are salvaged from the garbage piles of the Lower East Side. And there’s a lot of it.