The holiday season is once again upon us, like a gift-wrapped anvil dropped from a window. Time to gather with loved ones, resurrect old arguments and abruptly change the subject with the exchange of presents.
But what if you don’t have enough Yankee Candles to re-gift? What if you left the mall with only a Far Side desk calendar and a Starbucks hot chocolate? What if everything in the L.L. Bean catalog looks exactly like presents you gave last year, or in 1989?
Allow us to suggest a fresh solution to your gift-shopping woes: items that the City of New York no longer has any use for. The detritus of the metropolis. The castoffs of Gotham.
Leave Dad speechless by presenting him with a 40-foot shipping container once used by the Department of Environmental Protection. Just like those massive containers you see stacked on cargo ships! Bidding starts at a low, low $100.
Mom will hold you tight — maybe too tight — after you give her not one, not 10, but 100 cans of “flying insect killer spray.” The starting bid for the entire set is just $5.
And the children will squeal for joy when they look under the tree to find three Motorola walkie-talkies once used by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Imagine if those walkie-talkies could talk! Opening bid is $5. Ten-four.
All of this, and so much more — outdated office supplies, broken lamps, used washing machines, underwater sonar equipment, protective masks — come and go on the public auction site overseen by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the little-noticed but essential agency that makes this vast city the chaotic miracle that it is.
DCAS, as it is known among the municipal cognoscenti, is responsible for hiring and training city employees, managing dozens of public buildings, overseeing city property — and purchasing over $1 billion in goods and services every year. The agency’s commissioner, Dawn M. Pinnock, described its online surplus auctions as a “smorgasbord” of the fascinating and random things “that go into managing a government this large and delivering services to over 8.3 million New Yorkers.”
But the usefulness of those goods is not eternal. What happens when the Department of Aging no longer needs something called a camcorder? When the combination to that ancient safe up on West 135th Street has long since been forgotten? When the beat-up chairs in the reception area of the Brooklyn borough president’s office are no longer receptive? When DCAS needs to dispose of a 12-ton lathe machine from the 1950s?
Such weighty matters fall under the purview of Juan Batista, a DCAS senior executive director who runs its Central Storehouse, in Queens. His power to dispose of items that have outlived their usefulness is laid out in the City Charter (Title 55, Chapter 5: Disposition of Personal Property).
Mr. Batista explained that every city agency has a “salvage officer” responsible for things that are just taking up space. If a disused item can’t be placed with another agency, the officer works with DCAS to take photographs and post an apt description on the city’s public surplus auction website.
Occasionally, some city object up for auction attracts outsize attention. In early 2022, the comedians Colin Jost and Pete Davidson, along with a third partner, ponied up $280,000 for a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry boat. A few months later, an anonymous bidder paid $236,000 for a “redbird” subway car from the 1960s.
More often, though, the items are so ordinary — so unremarkable — that their photographs seem like exhibits from some post-post-postmodern art installation about municipal-government irony.
“Pencils Without Erasers.” “Adding-Machine Paper Rolls.” “Rubber Bands.” “Wired Keyboard.” “Hoover Vacuum Cleaner.”
Hoover vacuum cleaner, you say? Yes, but it’s broken: “Parts Only.”
To study the auction list’s flotsam-and-jetsam flow is to get a faint sense of the cosmic New York City operation: the requisition forms and approvals and signatures and who knows what else behind nearly every item that figures in the daily metropolitan grind. The rolls of toilet paper in the City Hall bathrooms. The bedding in the emergency shelters. The stuff of a city.
Even the directness of the language describing the items evokes a New York sensibility, bringing to mind a weary cop standing in Times Square and answering questions about how to get to Times Square.
“Broken Metal Lamp.” “Two Stained Gray-Cushioned Chairs.” “Two Wobbly Wooden Tables,” with the helpful addendum that “the table is not stable to place items on it.”
Buyer beware, pal.
Then again, you never know. Mr. Batista said the site attracts many regular bidders whose embrace of the possible helps to fuel the city’s entrepreneurial spirit. Like the visionary who sees a secondary market for those 92 used motion-sensing soap dispensers (the 184 AA batteries needed not included), or senses the scrap potential in the 11 pallets of “unclean” radiators.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Mr. Batista said. “I love to think it’s all a great second act.”
And a great option for holiday gifts.
For the kids, maybe a cache of retro goodies from the bowels of the Staten Island borough president’s office. Just picture their delight as they try to figure out the purpose of a drum cartridge for a fax machine, or the transparent card protectors for the once-ubiquitous desk item known as a Rolodex.
For Mom, perhaps something more adventurous than those cans of flying insect killer spray. Consider the seven scuba dive flashlights — all from the Police Department’s harbor unit, and all “nonoperational” and in “poor” condition.
But for Dad, you just can’t beat that 40-foot shipping container. It’s as blue as the ocean, with rusty dents and gaping holes that speak to its authenticity. This is no replica.
Match that $100 starting bid and all Dad has to do is go to Wards Island and pick it up. (Seriously. No deliveries.)
Just imagine the expression on the old man’s face!
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.