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Eyesore Revisited

In issue #23 (American Gentrifier), I wrote about the profusion of U'SAgain's fake-charity clothing collection boxes in Brooklyn. (For those unfamiliar, the article is now online.) 

The intervening months since I originally wrote the piece have not been kind to those boxes. Would-be donors have dumped piles of clothes around all around them; the boxes end up shucked like oysters, the undesirable contents strewn about the street. As if this crime-magnet isn't bad enough, the homeless have repurposed the collection boxes for their own uses -- as dumpsters and semi-private urinals. The owner of the bodega at St. John's and Underhill asked the company to remove the box in front of his store after someone started a fire inside it. Meanwhile, the box at the corner of Washington and Lincoln now bears the graffito, "For-profit corporation. Donate to charity instead."

An example of the type of treatment the boxes receive (and deserve) was this box, knocked over and dragged into the street near the corner of Prospect and Underhill: