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New Year's Cleanup Effort Leaves Times Square Scrubbed

By DNAinfo Staff on January 1, 2012 3:55pm

Cleanup of Times Square began soon after the strike of midnight on Jan. 1, 2012.
Cleanup of Times Square began soon after the strike of midnight on Jan. 1, 2012.
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DNAinfo/Andrea Swalec

By Sonja Sharp and Andrea Swalec

DNAinfo Staff

TIMES SQUARE — Tom Mellett spent his New Year's morning cleaning vomit off his windows. 

The assistant manager at GNC on Seventh Avenue at 49th Street came to work Sunday morning to find the unpleasant surprise, likely left behind by an overzealous midnight reveler among the hundreds of thousands who descended Times Square to usher in the New Year.

But even as he scrubbed, Mellett couldn't help but marvel at the transformation that took place in the hours after the ball dropped. 

"Actually, it's pretty clean," Mellett said. "It's horrible every year — I don't know what's happend this time."

By late morning on New Year's Day, there was little more than a dusting of confetti on the ground around 42nd Street and Broadway — thanks to an army of more than 150 sanitation workers who spent the first hours of 2012 clearing away tons of trash, including a full ton of the colorful paper circles. 

Cleanup crews in red jumpsuits got to work about 10 minutes after midnight, armed with 24 mechanical sweepers, 22 collection trucks, 37 leaf blowers, and other tools to move trash and confetti, according to the Sanitation Department. The city collected more than 56 tons of festive New Years trash after the ball dropped in 2011. 

Police officers started loading barricades into trucks around 12:30 a.m. 

Melinda Smith, 52, and her son Sam Miller, 18, aided cleanup efforts in their own way — by collecting confetti from the ground. Smith said she would give the confetti, which she she placed into a plastic grocery bag, to her nieces back home in British Columbia.

"This is the most special thing here, because it actually fell during New Year's Eve here," she said. 

Though the side streets were still thick Sunday with the detritus of Times Square's biggest night, few of the tourists who filled Broadway during the day seemed to notice.

"It was crazy — people were packed in like sardines," said Pamela Ratliffe, 45, of South Carolina, who spent her New Year's Eve in Times Square and was surprised to see the streets clear the next morning.

"They did a good job. "

Other visitors were slightly more perturbed by the leftover party favors. 

"Yesterday was a lot of people and a lot of garbage on the street," said Brikene Berisha, 23, who came up from North Carolina to spend her New Year's in New York. "Some of the side streets are not still that clean."

But for first-time visitor David Tinker, 25, the post-New Year's Eve scene at the Crossroads of the World was a bit of a letdown. As he stood outside his hotel on West 45th Street Sunday, the Texas native lamented the state of the streets. 

"I expected it to be dirty," he said.