CARP, The Please Take, The Philadelphia Dumpster Divers, and members in the press

With some trash and a little cash, recent grads can furnish their new digs cheaply.

Jennifer Weiner.

Your parents love you, little graduate. 

They cherish your company. They delight in your presence. 

But at some point in the future (and by "some point in the future" we
mean about late August), they're not going to want you around. 

No more days on the couch, no more nights on the town. No more free
electricity, free air conditioning, free rent, free laundry, free food or
free advice. 

You'll have to get a job (or at least go to graduate school). And, before
long, those of you who can afford it will make the same exodus that
twentysomethings throughout time have made. You will pack up your
belongings. You will get a friend with a truck to move them. You will find
a Room of Your Own. 

And you will need to furnish it. Cheap. 

For the purposes of argument, let's pretend that your folks have been
generous, and that they've let you go with a bed, and an old TV set. Maybe
you've got a boom box and a VCR you netted as graduation presents, and a
chair or two that you fished out of the basement, or picked up at a tag
sale. 

And say you have $200 in graduation-gift money with which to furnish the
rest of your abode in a stylish, comfortable manner that won't send your
parents screaming for the exterminator or potential love interests running
for the hills. 

Can you do it? 

Sure you can. But you'll need to be creative, and wily, and shameless
about picking through your neighbors' trash. 

Our first stop on the road to the $200 room - the Dumpster Divers. The
Divers are a loose affiliation of Philadelphia artists, sculptors and
inveterate pack rats who believe that there's buried treasure in the
city's dumpsters. 

We met the Divers at a May Day party in a funky artist's loft done up with
streamers, sculpture, and tiny plastic doll-babies that had been salvaged
from the trash. The party's centerpiece is a 1928 Bryn Mawr yearbook that
someone rescued from a trash heap at 55th and Market; 1928 happens to be
the year that a certain Katharine Houghton Hepburn graduated from Bryn
Mawr, and the book is open to a page with her picture. 

"It's amazing what you can find in the trash," says Diver Neil Benson,
who's decorated most of his house with stuff he's found. 

Beyond just creating art and furnishing their spaces, the divers say
they've got a higher mission. 

"We're preserving and restoring Philadelphia," said Larry Davis [ed's
note article error should be:Len Davidson], one of
the Divers' founders. "We live in the city, we love the city, and we're
recycling the city. It's a higher purpose than just playing with junk."

In the city's dumpsters, the Divers find raw material for their art: 

Wood. Pipes. Old cameras. Polaroid battery packs. Slabs of marble. Coffee
cup lids. Chunks of mirror. Old neon signs. Christmas garlands. Antique
clocks. 

They also find stuff for their houses - everything from chairs and tables
to rock maple kitchen countertops and swinging mahogany doors. 

For these people, dumpster diving isn't something you pencil on to your
calender and set out to do, say, once a week. It's like window-shopping _
something they're doing half-consciously, all the time. 

"Dumpster diving is a hobby of opportunity," Benson said. "Every day
the city puts out presents. You just have to go find them." 

We explained our mission and, after some coaxing, and much complaining
about how "every time the media gets on this story the dumpsters are
overrun!" Benson and two of his cohorts, Kate Bartoldis and John Huss,
helped out. 

First, they showed us the ropes. 

There are two good types of trash heaps that the divers look for. 

One is the morbidly named "death pile" - the heaps of accumulated
clothing, books, kitchen ware, photographs, letters and other stuff that
results when someone dies and his or her survivors don't want to take the
time to pick through what's been left, or even send it to charity - so
they just dump it on the street. 

The second, ironically, is the "student pile" - the stuff students
decide they don't want to haul back home, which can include furniture,
futons and stereos. Students, the Divers agree, can be incredibly wasteful
when it comes to leaving old things behind. 

If you can't luck into a death pile or a student pile, the divers said
you've got to be shameless about what you do find. 

Even if you're on your way to work, dressed in your best, you've got to
grab that chair/desk/vase/painting when you find it. 

"It's sharp eyes, good luck, and not being embarrassed to hop up in a
dumpster or bend over in the trash," said artist Liz Doering. 

So we were fired up. We were ready. We were prepared to put all shame
aside and go digging in the dirt. 

Unfortunately, our night out was something of a bust. 

We found a dumpster on Sansom Street and hopped over the edges and into
the trash to discover a beat-up couch that didn't seem salvageable -
especially since there was something that looked like sludgy coffee and
smelled much, much worse collecting in the bottom of the dumpster and
seeping into the cushions. 

At another dumpster, we found ourselves knee-deep among dozens of old
push-button telephones there for the taking - but all of the wires, alas,
had been snipped. (Favorite diving moment - when a homeless man walked
alongside the dumpster and asked Benson for change. "Can't you see I'm in
a dumpster?" was his reply.) 

The artists found raw materials aplenty. There were piles of slate stacked
beside another dumpster, yards and yards of metal tubing piled in another
dumpster a few blocks down. And the find of the night _ an abandoned grand
piano, leaning on the side of a church. 

But there wasn't much in the way of home furnishings. 

Still, we kept our eyes open and kept up the search. And, days later, on
an early-morning stroll, we lucked onto a third kind of treasure trove -
the moving pile. 

No, the trash itself wasn't moving, but the people who'd left it behind
obviously were. There, on the street, were posters ... flowerpots ... a
small wooden table ... and a futon, frame, pad and all. 

We snatched up the table and hustled home with it. We hurried back to the
pile and were greeted with the unwelcome sight of two fleet-footed youths
spiriting the reassembled futon around the corner. (Moral: Never dumpster
dive alone.) So we consoled ourselves with two pretty vases, and called it
even. 

Our next stop: the Salvation Army. 

We headed out with two Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science
students who, we figured, were bound to be artistically inclined - Amy
Chorey, who had braved the dumpster dive, and Kali Frazer. 

And we found furniture. All kinds of furniture. Furniture that last basked
in the light of popularity somewhere around the Nixon administration. 

We're talking brown corduroy couches and pink Formica tables. Ugly prints
and fabrics that were slithery to the touch. 

But none of it mattered, because we were going to re-cover our finds, as
simply as we could, with other, hipper fabrics. 

So we plunked down $80 for a two-piece couch of worn brown velveteen, and
$90 for the aforementioned pink Formica dining-room table, plus four pink
and black chairs. Six bucks more went for a double-headed, swivel-necked
gold reading lamp. 

(Important note: If you don't have any friends with trucks, call the cheap
moving services listed in the Yellow Pages or in the back of your city's
free weekly papers. Or look for business cards tacked up at the thrift
shop where you buy your stuff. We paid $80 to have all of our stuff carted
from the Salvation Army. If you're still in college, or living at home but
contemplating the big move, take our advice _ find someone with a truck
and start soliciting his or her friendship. Immediately.) 

Finally, we dispatched Frazer and Chorey to the fabric store, where $20
bought enough brown and blue denim, blue-and-white plaid, and a blue and
brown bandana-print fabric to cover both sections of the couch. 

Twenty dollars or so netted us the rest of what we'd need _ glue, safety
pins, T-pins, cream and blue paint, with change left over for pizza and
soda. 

Then it was time to go to work. 

We stripped the couch of its cushions, cut the fabric to fit, and pinned
it on - the plaid for the big cushions, the denim and print for the
smaller cushions on the side. (If you want to go even more low-budget, or
low-tech, decorators suggest buying a queen-size printed sheet, and
draping and tucking that around your couch. Indian-print bedspreads also
work - Urban Outfitters sells them for about $30. If you want to go
high-end, Ikea sells "quick covers" in three sizes and four patterns
including black-and-white cow spots. Prices range from $99 for an armchair
to $199 for a three-seat sofa. 

Frazer took over at the little table. She spray-painted it cream, trimmed
it with blue paint, and glued a picture cut from last year's calendar to
the flaking top. 

We hosed down our pink Formica find, wiped off the chairs and set the
assemblage in a corner, hoping it would broadcast retro sensibilities,
instead of empty pockets. Then we plugged in our lamp, fluffed the pillows
and collapsed, exhausted, into our new home.