As the saying goes: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. For Nelson Molina, those are the same thing.
Molina is a resident of New York City where he has been a garbage man for over 34 years. The city is estimated to have a population of 8.4 million people, which obviously leads to quite a lot of trash.
And during his time as a garbage man, Molina found a lot of incredible things.
He found enough of them, in fact, to open up his own museum in East Harlem.
This tourist curiosity is called the “Treasure in the Trash’ museum, and houses all sorts of different collectible and knick-knacks—some of them probably worth a considerable amount of money.
“New Yorkers throw away too many things,” Molina says. “Either these people don’t know the value of [this stuff] or they didn’t want it.”
Molina’s fixation on things other people didn’t want goes back before he worked for the Department of Sanitation.
“I’ve been a picker since I was nine years old. I had two brothers and three sisters so we were a family of six. We didn’t get much for Christmas so I just went out and started finding stuff—some toy trucks for my brothers, a doll with a missing arm, I would fix it. I was like Santa Clause to them.”
Talking a walk through Molina’s makeshift museum is in many ways like a historical tour of the city.
In one area, he has an eight-millimeter film projector with silent movies that are still in working order.
In another, he has a framed photograph of soldiers in World War II, signed by every one of them.
From the more recent past is a Star of David, forged from the metal of the Twin Towers.
“The whole museum is special to me. It’s not open to the public, but people come up here almost every single day.”
Aside from fueling his unusual hobby, Molina says that working as a garbage man for the city of New York has given him a great life. Like the family he grew up in, Molina also had six children of his own. With the help of his salary, four of them went to college as well.
The museum is currently housed in an old garage in need of renovation.
Ultimately, Molina’s dream for his prized collection is for the city to take some ownership of it to help keep everything safe and preserved. “I want the New York City Department of Sanitation to get a nice building and open up a museum where they can put all this stuff.”
So far, the future of the collection remains unknown.
Above all, Molina’s labor of love teaches us to appreciate what we have and to open our eyes to the world around us. “It doesn’t matter what it is,” he says. “As long as it’s cool, I can hang it up and I’ve got a place for it.”
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