Brooklyn pizzeria owner spent $60K to pick up NYC street trash

Publish date: 2024-06-18

Meet New York City’s good neighbor.

For the last year, Sean Feeney, a finance veteran turned restaurateur, has been quietly padding out his resume with some major dirty work: garbage.

It’s an unsavory business. But in our city where trash is so ubiquitous it’s starting to feel like a coordinated street art project designed to offend the senses, the 43-year-old owner of Brooklyn’s Fini Pizza has taken a personal interest in its disposal.

Instead of flooding 311 with futile complaints about the muck, Feeney opened his cash register to help clean up his section of Williamsburg and now Downtown Brooklyn with an initiative he calls “clean streets.”

Since the fall of 2022, he’s dropped a whopping $60,000 of his own revenue on bins, bags and private trash pick-up.

“I lived [in Williamsburg] since 2016. I saw the deterioration in cleanliness,” Feeney, a married father of three, told me. “It’s unacceptable, it’s embarrassing and it’s disgusting.”

Sean Feeney, owner of Fini Pizza, stands with one of 50 garbage cans he’s put out in Brooklyn as part of his “Clean Streets” initiative. Tamara Beckwith
Sean Feeney chats with Paola Lopez, owner of Williamsburg stalwart Milly’s Mini Mart. He put a garbage can in front of her shop. Tamara Beckwith

A partner in Grovehouse Hospitality Group with celebrated chef Missy Robbins of Lilia and Misipasta, he opened Fini Pizza on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg in August of 2022 with the aim of slinging quality slices and becoming a meaningful part of the community.

“The mission of Fini is to deliver good days together. We’ve done that through serving delicious pizza and Italian ice. But we also did it by committing 3% of our revenue to invest it back into our neighbors.”

In the restaurant’s first few months, he polled customers on what they’d like to see improved.

Feeney also pays for the garbage bags lining the “Clean Streets” cans. Tamara Beckwith

“And 94% of our response rate was cleaner streets. When you hear guest after guest, neighbor after neighbor, comment on it, I said, ‘Let’s do something about it,'” said Feeney.

After some research, he bought five garbage cans for $220 a pop, painted them with the motto “clean streets” and Fini crown logo, and placed them by nearby businesses.

“We noticed overnight that it was cleaner, so we kept adding cans. We maintained them and had pick-up every night,” he said.

A tomato slice at Fini has garlic bread crumbs and chili oil. Stefano Giovannini

About a month into it, he was hit with a snag — a flurry of fines by the Department of Sanitation because the amateur garbage man was unknowingly placing the cans too close to the curb.

But then he met with department commissioner Jessica Tisch and explained what he was doing.

“She gave us her blessing,” said Feeney, who was also absolved of the fines.

Knowing my frequent gripes about the city’s filth, a mutual friend introduced me to Feeney. It turned out we come from the same area near the Jersey Shore. And we bonded over the pizzerias of our youth: sacred spots where pizzamen nourished us during big and small moments of our lives, watched us grow and sponsored our youth sports teams — all with a personal mom-and-pop touch.

When opening his own spot, Feeney was inspired by those very places.

Customer Ceava Kats eats a slice at Fini Pizza in Williamsburg. Owner Sean Feeney has invested $60,000 of his revenue to clean up the streets. Stefano Giovannini

“Pizzerias are part of a neighborhood tapestry and they have a great responsibility to bring people together,” said Feeney, who sponsored a boys’ high school basketball tournament — the Fini Hoops Invitational —  last summer.

Garbage, however, remains his biggest non-dough based initiative.

During a walk around Williamsburg, we saw a guy deposit a bag of his dog’s business in one of his green cans, and Feeney lit up.

“Before that can was there, people would just not clean it up or drop the bag on the sidewalk.”

“The mission of Fini is to deliver good days together,” Feeney said of his Williamsburg pizzeria. Stefano Giovannini

In a well-functioning society, it shouldn’t be a responsibility of private companies who already pay through the nose to do the job of city agencies.

But given the current dysfunctional state of NYC, and the belt-tightening effects of the migrant crisis, Gotham’s newest heroes won’t be born in a voting booth.

“I think it’s easy and rational to put the responsibility on government. We didn’t want to waste time even thinking that. We wanted to know what we could do to help,” Feeney said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Sanitation said, “We appreciate all businesses that are doing their part to help revolutionize the way trash is managed in NYC.”

A dog owner drops his dog’s waste into one of the 50 bins Sean Feeney pizzeria has provided on the streets of Brooklyn. Tamara Beckwith

He hopes that in talking about his self-funded foray into waste management, it will challenge other businesses to solve one of our many acute problems.

“What if we were to incentivize other companies? How do we enter into a bigger public private partnership to tackle this crisis and support the city that’s going through a really tough time?” he asked.

There are now 50 Fini garbage cans: 30 in Williamsburg and 20 in Downtown Brooklyn, where a pizzeria outpost attached to Barclays Center opened this past September. Feeney’s even had three customers buy some of the garbage cans and other associates ask how to get their own hands dirty.

Feeney was initially fined by the Department of Sanitation for placing his cans too close to the curb — but now they’re in favor of his initiative. Tamara Beckwith

“Whether you are a small bodega or a big investment firm, you don’t want to leave here. You fought through the bad times and are facing more. You can be involved in any way you want,” said Feeney with a contagious optimism.

“I’m proud to live here. And I’m even prouder now that it’s cleaner.”

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