Life
"Treasure In The Trash" Museum Has Trash Found Over 34 Years
It's pretty incredible to see what this garbage man found in the trash over 34 years!
Ryan Aliapoulios
07.11.17

As the saying goes: one manโ€™s trash is another manโ€™s treasure. For Nelson Molina, those are the same thing.

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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.

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He found enough of them, in fact, to open up his own museum in East Harlem.

This tourist curiosity is called the โ€œTreasure in the Trashโ€™ museum, and houses all sorts of different collectible and knick-knacksโ€”some of them probably worth a considerable amount of money.

โ€œNew Yorkers throw away too many things,โ€ Molina says. โ€œEither these people donโ€™t know the value of [this stuff] or they didnโ€™t want it.โ€

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Molinaโ€™s fixation on things other people didnโ€™t want goes back before he worked for the Department of Sanitation.

โ€œIโ€™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 didnโ€™t get much for Christmas so I just went out and started finding stuffโ€”some toy trucks for my brothers, a doll with a missing arm, I would fix it. I was like Santa Clause to them.โ€

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Talking a walk through Molinaโ€™s makeshift museum is in many ways like a historical tour of the city.

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In one area, he has an eight-millimeter film projector with silent movies that are still in working order.

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In another, he has a framed photograph of soldiers in World War II, signed by every one of them.

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From the more recent past is a Star of David, forged from the metal of the Twin Towers.

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โ€œThe whole museum is special to me. Itโ€™s not open to the public, but people come up here almost every single day.โ€

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.

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The museum is currently housed in an old garage in need of renovation.

Ultimately, Molinaโ€™s dream for his prized collection is for the city to take some ownership of it to help keep everything safe and preserved. โ€œI 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.โ€

So far, the future of the collection remains unknown.

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Above all, Molinaโ€™s labor of love teaches us to appreciate what we have and to open our eyes to the world around us. โ€œIt doesnโ€™t matter what it is,โ€ he says. โ€œAs long as itโ€™s cool, I can hang it up and Iโ€™ve got a place for it.โ€

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