Moving Day

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet internet and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be checking off the boxes this evening, but I'll need some guys to do the heavy lifting.

Noah, Tom, and Heath.

I have pink eyes, sorry.

COVID.

I don't want to.

Honestly, a great summary of our cast.

I hope this is your first episode.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons.

Patrons, without you, the only moving we'd be doing is back in with our parents.

And that would only be nice for two of us.

So we thank you.

And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

We'll be talking about moving day.

And Tom, you've boxed this information up nice and neatly in your mind.

Are you ready to share what's left on Buy Nothing Your Neighborhood?

I'll tell you this, Eli.

Last time I moved, the amount of shit I just decided I'd rather not own rather than move it stretched from my side of the curb into my neighbor's property.

So let's do this.

That's true.

That's true.

Tom doesn't live at his house anymore.

So tell us, Tom, what is

moving day?

Also,

what's the deal with the human condition?

Thank you.

Thank you, Heath.

I'm glad you asked.

After 432 episodes, I feel like you finally get me.

Wow.

There you go.

All right, now, there are a few perfectly true facts about the human condition.

All right.

Sentences,

which, when uttered, are embraced by all peoples, regardless of race, creed, age, class, or sex.

But I know but one.

Moving sucks.

Even a good move is a nightmare of logistics and sweat and stress.

Even if you are moving to your dream home in your dream location to live with your favorite person, the very act of moving, of packing all your shit and cleaning and lifting and lugging and unpacking, of either hounding your friends to break your shit, or paying movers to do it, of making run after run with your buddies pickup, or renting a truck whose air conditioning has long ago failed, or playing air traffic control while beefy, indifferent, hungover college kids bump your shit into your walls.

Moving, it's just always, it's the fucking worst.

But like most awful shitty things, there are ways to make that even worse.

Which brings us to the subject of of today's episode, Moving Day.

Okay, between Noah showing a book how to do a biography last week and Tom dedicating an episode to lifting a couch this week, I expect Cecil's triumphant return essay to be about how long they will make you wait at baggage claims.

Oxford comma essay coming soon.

Oh, there you go.

So just to back up your point, Tom, moving is such a pain in the ass that I've chosen remaining in rural South Georgia over it for four years in a row.

By the way, that air conditioning thing happened to my car this weekend.

We drove 10 hours in like somehow 99 degree weather everywhere between Michigan and Maryland and my AC immediately stopped working.

We were just pouring sweat for the whole way down.

No, tell your wife to buy you a car.

She's a grown up.

Yeah.

She bought me some Freon for the way home.

I would have bought a new car before.

I would have stopped at a a car dealership on the road and bought a new car.

There's no way I'd bought it.

I was close.

I'm a grown-up.

Why are you marrying up and still driving around in your fucking Super Room, man?

It has no mileage for an 05.

Now, imagine how bad it would be if the same day that you were moving, all of your friends were also moving.

And your boss was moving, and your parents, and your neighbors, and everyone else that you knew, and everyone you didn't know across the entire city of, say,

New York.

Imagine how unutterably stupid and chaotic and nightmarish that would be.

That's real, and it's Moving Day, a tradition dating back to colonial times and which continued until after World War II.

Right, because I think we can all agree that the problem with New York is that not enough people are trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Yeah.

Okay, somehow Zoran Mamdani is getting investigated by ICE for this.

Does that make sense?

Well, there's box checking involved, so yes.

Now, moving day was preceded, as you might imagine, by something called rent day.

Rent day was on February the 1st, and on this day, all the landlords across the city would announce the new rents for the coming year, which meant that lots of people were discovering that either they couldn't afford their home anymore, or perhaps if they were very lucky, were discovering that they could afford something nicer.

Whichever it was, a few months after rent day on May the 1st, all leases in the entire city of New York all expired on the same day at the exact same time.

Why would any of that be on the same day every day?

Same day at 9 a.m.

Which meant that an absolute shit ton of people all on the same day needed to get the fuck out of one place and get the fuck into another.

Okay,

all right, look, I have been at the end of a line on a New York train when the only exit from the train was to the left and still motherfuckers bumped into each other.

I cannot imagine how New York even survived a tradition like this.

Got to get in before you get out because then I'll be there safe.

Now, I do want to apologize a little bit for this episode because I'll be quoting extensively in the back half of it, but the madness, the sheer chaos that Moving Day engendered was so perfect in its insanity that those who wrote about it at the time are best equipped to describe it.

In 1799, an observer of this orchestration of madness said that New Yorkers are, quote, seized on the first of May by a sort of madness that will not let them rest till they have changed their dwelling.

Yeah, it's the plane pulling up to the terminal, and everyone stands up at the exact same time, but the plane is everyone in New York City inside.

Also, let's make it a holiday.

What the fuck was happening?

May 1st was a citywide pandemonium.

With thousands and thousands of households all scrambling on the same day to move out of one place and into another, the city was in complete chaos.

Renters leaving one home for another had to wait for the home they were hoping to move into until it was vacated and cleaned out and was well enough suited for them to be moving in all on the same day they were themselves moving out.

And since the work all took place in one day, there was not enough steady business to create and sustain an industry of professional movers, which meant that regular laborers with carts were repurposed into movers for moving day.

But as you can imagine, there just weren't enough of those people.

So luckily, Everyone around knew that on May 1st, the city of New York was going to be a giant shit show.

And so farmers and everybody with a cart or a wheelbarrow would come into the city and just price gouge the shit out of everybody.

Just apple carts careening into other apple carts all over the place.

Just avoiding giant panes of glass being carried everywhere.

This all sounds like a Buster Keaton short setup.

Yes.

Everybody's got a penny farthing today.

That's weird.

By 1820, the volume of propertyless renters on moving day clogged the city streets with the aforementioned carts and barrows and wagons.

A cartmen were supposed to only charge the legally allotted amount for moving, but the truckmen just charged whatever the the hell they wanted because, of course they did.

And sometimes they were charging the equivalent of a week's wages to haul people's shit from one flat to another.

And some of them also decided to just go ahead and raise their fees mid-move.

And if customers refused to pay, the cartman would just cart all their shit to the police station and then tack on an extra fee for then having to move their shit to the police station.

Okay, but I feel like that's just stealing, right?

That's stealing.

Like, police station, that's the last place you want to go.

Fucking New York police station in the 1820s, I feel like that would be the best place to go.

They could probably give you advice on stealing.

You'd have to

bribe them first, but still, yeah.

Now, by 1856, the strict custom of moving day being only one actual day of madness began to lessen as people figured out this was a chaotic and stupid fucking way to do something already stressful.

And the brilliant solution they came up with was to informally create moving week.

Other days?

No.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Yeah.

Which stretched out the horror of moving day across a long enough period of time to just be maximally awful, but not a long enough period of time to fix the fucking problem.

Guys, these shit sandwiches are awful.

I feel like we should solve the problem with smaller portion sizes.

What if we eat shit all week and on a different day?

Yeah.

Though by 1873, after an economic depression had ended, fewer people had to move as often.

And this was because moving day resulted not just from expired leases, but from raised rents.

And after the depression, additional housing was constructed and it eased some of this completely preventable bullshit.

Just Ezra Klein angrily swimming around in his grandpa's balls.

This is what I'm talking about, people.

Also, nobody fertilized Mrs.

Douthett.

You got it?

Don't do that.

All right, now moving day sounds rough, but what could be worse than one moving day?

How about two moving days?

Near the end of the 19th century, many people in New York had figured out that living in a swamp off the Hudson in the summer was awful.

And those with the means often left the city for the cooler regions of New York State, which meant that October 1st became a sort of second moving day, with a flood of people returning into the city and taking their belongings out of storage and moving their their shit into their newly rented homes.

Okay, but at least we don't have to feel bad when those ones get price gouged, though.

That's fair.

And eventually, moving days sort of drifted from May 1st to October 1st and then consolidated back into just a single day.

At its height in the 20th century, fully 1 million people all moved on the same day in New York.

The tradition fell off, however, when the U.S.

entered World War II, since there was a shortage of men at home to do the actual work of moving people about.

And by 1945, the housing shortage just killed the tradition entirely.

Yeah, Sally Sectional and Bertha Box Spring didn't get the same buzz as Rosie the Riveter.

I mean, the tradition isn't gone entirely.

People still move on May 1st.

It's just

a coincidence.

Okay, fun fact: there were actually a couple of alternative characters to Rosie the Riveter.

One of them was Big Bertha, who just like moved big shit.

And the other one was Jenny on the job, I think.

It's just like Lady Job Lady.

A couple other ones, too.

I'm glad they stuck with Rosie.

Lady Job Lady would have been terrific.

I think that would have been inspiring on posters.

Meow.

Yeah, they made that noise, though.

I'm going to uppercut you, Bertha.

What we need now is a fighting game where we pit them all against each other.

Yeah.

Now, the moving day history is interesting, but really, it is the descriptions of what Moving Day was like that made me want to tell you guys this story.

So, in Domestic Manners of Americans, author Francis Trollope described Moving Day this way: quote: On the 1st of May, the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels.

Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south on this day.

Everyone I spoke to on this subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable if you inhabit a rented house.

More than one of my New York friends have built or bought houses solely to avoid this annual inconvenience.

It's unavoidable, they said, having never heard of literally everywhere else.

Why the fuck didn't Frances Trollope tell them about elsewhere?

She knew about it, clearly.

That's some historical society guy no one cares about wrote his daughter about Moving Day in 1832, saying,

Tuesday, the 1st of May, hazy, raw.

Yesterday was very unfavorable for the general moving of our great city.

High rents, incommodious dwellings, and necessity combine to crowd our

in the same houses.

Few instances of removals were seen, but now New York is literally in an uproar for several days before and after the 1st of May.

This practice of move all to strangers appears absurd, but it is attended with the advantage of affording a greater choice of abodes in the February quarter.

Oh, can't even find a decent guitar player with a flamethrower on his guitar.

It's untenable.

None other than Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, also saw and opined

about moving.

Thank you.

He said.

Men over 40 have to say the rest of those lines.

It is

in us, Eli.

It's shaving a haircut.

It's the Robert Rabbit fucking says shaving.

Roger Rabbit.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Quote, by the time we.

Correcting Eli on Roger Rabbit is the other one.

Quote, by the time we returned down Broadway, it seemed to me that the city was flying before some awful calamity.

Why, said I, Colonel, what under heaven is this matter?

Everyone appears to be pitching out their furniture and packing it off.

He laughed and said this was the general moving day.

Such a sight nobody ever saw unless it was in this same city.

It seemed a kind of frolic, as if they were changing houses just for fun.

Every street was crowded with carts, drays, and people.

So the world goes.

It would take a good deal to get me out of my log house, but here I understand many persons move every year.

He sounds like Cecil being shown a piece of ZD on a slice of pizza.

I sure have strange traditions here, I said, while adjusting the dead raccoon on my head and taking a bite from my fried squirrel on a stick.

Fuck you.

I still have a scar from that ZD incident with Cecil.

But you've learned your lesson, though.

I have not, though.

That's the problem.

I should, though.

He's very strong.

In the 1843 book, A Narrative of Two Years' City and Country Residence in the United States, an Englishwoman that you've never heard of, describes it this way: quote, By an established custom, the houses are let from this day, May the first, for the term of one year certain.

And as the inhabitants in general love variety and seldom reside in the same house for two consecutive years, those who have to change, which appears to be nearly the whole city, must be all removed together.

Hence, from the peep of day till twilight, may be seen carts which go at a rate of speed astonishingly rapid, laden with furniture of every kind, racing up and down the city as if its inhabitants were flying from a pestilence, pursued by death with his broad scythe just ready to mow them into eternity.

All right, well, but if death is chasing you with his scythe, I feel like you would leave your shifurobe behind, wouldn't you?

I feel like somebody would invent 13 months for at least one time.

You'd think like a TED Talk.

The future is now.

13 months.

And every 11 months, actually, we could go 11 too.

All right.

Well, while we sit Tom down and break it to him that moving day is like the eighth worst thing New York City does on a regular basis, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing.

Now you get out of my way.

No, you get out of my way.

Hey, fellas.

What's all the hubbub?

I'll tell you what it is.

It's moving day, and this Maloink won't get out of my way.

Maloink, eh?

Sounds like a real heart and gopher thing to say.

Them's fightin' words.

Fellas, fellas, surely we can work this out.

We needn't be at each other's throats.

I'm sorry, brother.

It's just it's moving day.

The whole city moves on the same day.

Oh, oh okay um

but but why

well'cause the lease has expired and the rent is due.

Right, right.

I understand that's when everyone's lease is up, I I guess, but why don't we just, I don't know, talk to our neighbors, figure out how to work together?

And move in late?

The hell I will.

Okay, okay, well, y you have a cart with all your belongings in the middle of the street and you're screaming at someone.

Wouldn't you rather just not

do that?

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, it just feels to me like these inequalities would be better remedied by group action than by everyone behaving as badly as possible.

Well, yeah,

oh, but if we do behave badly, we might get to go first.

Oh, yeah, out of my way.

Now you get out of my way.

Yeah, there it is.

Okay, and then I'm pretty sure Tom was like, oh, I'm afraid of the wheel.

Let's use something square instead.

Okay, I didn't say that.

I feel like you did.

Hey, fellas, what you doing?

Oh, no, fantastic.

We're trying to remember what we decided at last week's company meeting, but Tom is being difficult.

I'm not being difficult.

And Eli's doing an impression of Cookie Monster.

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Well, right now, when you sign up for a yearly Firefly subscription, you can get your first two months for free.

Just go to fireflies.ai/slash/citation.

That's right, two months for free when you go to fireflies.ai/slash citation.

That's fireflies.ai slash citation.

Awesome, Noah.

Thanks.

But for right now, we have to rely on my impression of Tom.

Yeah, definitely doing Elast thing.

That's not even how I sound.

Well, I mean, that is how you sound.

That's exactly how you sound.

I feel like that's how I sound.

You're doing it again.

And we're back.

When we left off, New York was walking over here.

Tom, what happened next?

All right, let me give you another description.

This time from a lawyer in his diary.

Where do you get your toodles?

This time from a lawyer in his diary, and he wrote, quote, May the 1st, fine weather to the great comfort of the locomotive public.

Never knew the city in such a chaotic state.

Every other house seems to be be disgorging itself into the street.

All the sidewalks are lumbered with bureaus and bedsteads to the utter destruction of their character as thoroughfares, and all the space between the sidewalks is occupied by long processions of carts and wagons, and vehicles omnigenous laden with perilous piles of movables.

We certainly haven't advanced as a people beyond the nomadic or migratory stage of civilization analogous to that of the pastoral cow feeders of the Tartar steppes.

And this is why I drive my car on the sidewalk when there's traffic people because I'm respecting the Tartar steppes.

I love East almost all the way through and he's like, fuck, this isn't bigoted yet.

And it's the 1800s.

What the fuck are we?

A bunch of Ukrainians over here?

Come on.

By 1865, the Times described the Cartman I mentioned before, saying,

On the 1st of May, too, the Cartman becomes a different creature, not particularly civil at any time.

On moving day, he must be approached with caution.

He has become lord of the ascendant.

Ordinary offers do not tempt him.

He has been known to laugh to scorn a man who offered him five dollars to convey a load half a dozen blocks.

He declines making any previous engagements.

He seeks no customers, but rather conveys the idea that he would prefer to be let alone.

At the same time, he keeps a sharp eye to business and only accepts an offer when he knows he can't beat a cent more out of his customer.

And then, when he is engaged, he goes about his work with supremest indifference.

He is above all ordinances.

He is a creation of the day.

Tomorrow, he will be a mere cartman, amenable to law and standing in fear of the mayor's marshal.

Okay, spoken like a man who never had to order an Uber in the rain.

Yeah, right.

Right.

Yeah, these days that's called surge pricing.

Yes.

Another great description of this entirely artificially created citywide crisis.

Quote, all New York moves on the first of May, not only moves about as usual in the everlasting hurry-scurry of business, but one house empties itself into another all over the city.

The streets are full of loaded drays on which tables are dancing and carpets rolling to and fro.

Small chairs, which bring up such pretty cozy images of roly-poly mannequins and maidens eating supper from tilted porridges and spilling the milk on their nightgowns.

Really specific.

That's very specific.

That's a kink, right?

That's a sex kink.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah, no, Tom, you should read that like you're like touching yourself under the table.

Licking your lips.

Yeah, yeah.

Small chairs, which.

It's really quick.

Oh, now you're just trying to beat no.

You just read everything.

Mark Twain voice from last week.

Do you want to start all the way at the beginning?

Man.

Of the show.

Episode one.

Yeah, right.

Incredulous USA.

These go ricketing along on the tops of beds and bureaus and not unfrequently pitch into the street.

and so fall asunder.

Children are driving hither and yon, one with a flower pot in his hand, another another with workbox, band box, or oil canaken, each so intent upon his important mission that all the world seems to him, as it does to many a theologian, safely locked up within the little walls he carries.

All right, so if I'm following the language correctly, he kind of went out of his way to add a parenthetical priests or simple-minded idiots into his description.

And I kind of love him for that.

Continuing, quote, the dogs seem bewildered with this universal transmigration of bodies, and as for the cats, they sit on the doorsteps mewing piteously, that they were not born in the Middle Ages, or at least in the quiet old portion of the world.

And I, who have almost as strong a love of localities as poor puss, turn away from the windows where they suppressed anathema on the 19th century with its perpetual changes.

Okay, cats get mad if they see one suitcase.

If this tradition ends with a squad of like murder cats in riot gear putting down the moving tame op, I think I'm on board.

Do you want an appropriate emblem of this country and its age?

Then stand on the sidewalks of New York and watch the universal transit on the 1st of May.

However, human beings are such creatures of habit and imitation that what is necessity soon becomes fashion, and each one wishes to do what everyone else is doing.

A lady in the neighborhood closed all her blinds and shutters on May Day.

Being asked by her acquaintance whether she had been in the country, she answered,

I was ashamed not to be moving on the first of May, and so I shut up the house that the neighbors might not know it.

One could not well imagine a fact more characteristic of the despotic sway of custom and public opinion in the United States in the 19th century.

20th century is like, hold hold my beer.

And of course, the New York Times in 1855 had some advice and commentary.

Quote: It will begin early before some of us are up, no doubt, and it will continue late.

The sidewalks will be worse obstructed in every street than Wall Street is where the brokers are in full blast.

Old beds and rickety bedstands, handsome pianos and kitchen furniture will be chaotically huddled together.

Everything will be in a muddle.

Everybody in a hurry, smashing mirrors in his haste and carefully guarding boot boxes from harm.

Sofas that go out sound will go in maimed.

Tables that enjoyed casters will scratch along and tip on one less than its compliment.

Bed screws will be lost in the confusion, and many a good piece of furniture badly bruised in consequence.

You gotta take it apart and put those screws in his ziplock, you fucking monsters!

You take that shit to the leg or whatever.

Jesus.

They have tape.

1800s.

Figure it out.

1800s.

Do they have duct tape?

Is it duck or duct?

Duck or duct.

Back then it was chicken tape.

Still Tyrannosaurus tape back then, yeah.

That's a better joke.

That is a better joke.

Family pictures.

I'm going to keep both.

Oh, no.

Family pictures will be sadly marred, and the china will be a broken set before night in many a house.

All houses will be dirty, never

so dirty, into which people move, and the dirt of the old will seem enviable beside the cleanliness of the new.

The old people will in their hearts murmur at these moving dispensations.

The younger people, though aching in every bone and tired to death, will relish the change, and think the new closets more roomy and more nice, and delight themselves fancying how this piece of furniture will look look here and that piece in the other corner.

The still younger ones will still more enjoy it.

In the cellar and upon the roof, into the rat holes and on the yard fence, into each room and prying into every cupboard, they will make reprisals of many things worth saving and mark the day white in their calendar as little less to be longed for in the return than 4th of July itself.

Yeah, this is almost as good as the day we set off pretty explosions, is not the brag the gray lady thinks.

But, okay, but here's the thing, though.

This sounds terrible and everything, but then I compared it to like actually apartment hunting in New York City and my experiences with that.

And I don't know that it got better.

I feel like maybe we should go back to this and give it another go.

I feel like you'd fucking handle the shit out of a dream no illusions.

You got to have a dre of gold now.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Dreidel.

That continues.

Keep your tempers, good people.

Don't growl at the carmen or haggle over the price charged.

When the scratched furniture comes in, don't believe it is utterly ruined.

A few nails, a little glue, a piece of putty, and a pint of varnish will rejuvenate many articles that will grow very old twixt morning and night and undo much of the mischief that comes of moving and which at first sight seems irreparable.

All right, nothing more New York than adding, also don't come fucking whining to me because your furniture's ruined.

Everybody's fucking furniture is fucking ruined, okay?

Amazing.

Eli, what was your Dregold thing?

Just Jewish people.

You're not letting my swings, you know, hit the edit room floor

this evening, Heath and Rennett.

Like, I'd like to leave.

I didn't hear it.

I'd like it to lay on the floor with all the other drinks.

I enjoyed it.

The coughs, the sneezes, the ums, the uhs,

and my jokes.

You're probably thinking that this all sounds completely mad, but also the kind of mad that happened in times gone by.

Surely you are saying to yourself that a major U.S.

city would not in the 21st century still have something so artificially panic-inducing and stupid, and that can only add stress and strife to a day already rife with stress and strife.

And if you thought that, then you have not heard of Alston Christmas, which is moving day in Boston, and which is still very much an ongoing concern.

It turned Tom into Dr.

Seuss for a second.

I mean, of all the 1800s traditions that Boston keeps, Moving Day is the one I'm least concerned with, Tom.

I hate you telling me that.

Okay, that guy was just trying to move his pressure cooker to an apartment.

Oh, my God.

Oh, fucking shit.

On September the 1st in Boston, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of all the leases in the city expire, prompting, of course, moving day.

In Boston, many of the affected leases are those of college students, and across the city, swaths of unprepared college kids scramble to move their shit.

And since college kids are not known for their long-term planning and preparation skills, a just shit ton of furniture and belongings end up dumped on the curb to be claimed by scavengers.

A great many of these lease expirations take place in the Alston neighborhood, and with all the free stuff abandoned across the city, the tradition took on the name Alston Christmas.

Really, Tom?

You choose this topic on a week when Cecil isn't here to do Boston lady voice?

What?

Wait.

We're taking this fucking couch.

We're taking it.

Fucking pick up the side.

I'm getting so pregnant on this thing.

Fucking pivot.

Bob's so pregnant right now.

I'm going to breeze the cum spots.

We'll keep him.

Whatever.

The Boston Globe Globe in 1925 describes Moving Day's mad scramble this way: quote, in many actual cases today, one set of furniture waits on the lawn for the other to move out.

It is the old game, going to Jerusalem on a larger scale.

Okay, so I looked that up.

That is the colonialism name for musical chairs.

And as bad as that is, like, especially given present circumstances, it's nowhere near as anti-Semitic as I was expecting.

So, at least there's that.

Yeah, you don't have to play to Havana Gila, but it helps.

Oh, this is the mad scramble from one location to another.

Everyone trying to settle down in a preferred position and discovering new neighbors in the process.

As in the old game, also, every time there is a scramble, someone gets left.

There are 15 families, all of which planned to move today, each one into a house formerly occupied by one of the others.

And all 15 are held up because number one family is building a house for itself and can't move in until the plaster is dry.

And number two family can't move move until number one moves out.

And number three is waiting for number two.

And so on.

And nobody had invented talking to each other yet.

No?

Or other days.

They hadn't invented other days.

Very simple.

Very simple solution.

Now, unlike New Yorkers, Bostonians never abandoned moving day.

On moving day, there are widespread traffic jams and diversions and, of course, accidents.

So Boston.

Yeah, Boston.

Boston.

The roads, which in Boston are already impossible to traverse, become impassable, not just from traffic, but from shit just falling off of poorly packed trucks and blocking the roads.

Trash and debris are strewn across the city, and an enormous amount of garbage appears suddenly and in enormous volumes.

So Boston.

Fenway Park.

In 2023, Moving Day in Boston produced 38 tons of waste and 1,700 abandoned mattresses, presumably left behind by people who no longer need to sleep on mattresses.

Clearly.

The city of Boston tries to reduce the impact of moving day, but again, with tens of thousands of people moving on one day, that is just impossible.

Movers are required to get street occupancy permits, which I think is fucking adorable since Boston is the only place I have personally been to where people don't just double park, but I shit you not, triple park.

That's on a regular Bostonian day.

We do that in New York too.

Yeah.

Those who get caught dumping furniture and shit are ticketed, but the city is just overrun with abandoned furniture because of course it is.

Even the MBTA subway tries to help, extending its hours to accommodate hapless Bostonians who are moving and trying to do so via the goddamn subway.

Just 30 street preachers with megaphones on one side of a car avoiding some shitty college kid just hugging a couch.

A lot of cum on that thing, man.

And that still sounds better than the time I helped move someone from one three-floor walk up to another three-floor walk up, literally across the goddamn street in July, and which 20 years later, I'm still mad about.

Tom, is Cecil really on vacation or is your revenge come true?

On vacation.

All right.

Well, if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

If you need help moving, don't call me.

All right.

And are you ready for the quiz?

I am.

Tom would be so good at moving shit.

Tom would be amazing.

Imagine moving moving.

I figured you would just throw it from the third floor to the other third floor across the street.

All right.

So, given how well everybody moves on the same day worked out for them, what other citywide cluster fucks did Boston try?

A, an ordinance that required all people to get married on the same day and have the same anniversary.

B, a rule that gave all of the firefighters the same day off.

C,

a municipal holiday called Let's All Drive on the Left Day, or D,

the big dig.

Oh, shit.

It is definitely the big dig.

Yes, it was, in fact, the big dig.

All right, Tom, what's the most important thing for renters in places like New York and Boston to remember?

A,

landlords cannot magically evict you into a pumpkin the day your lease ends.

B, it takes several months at least to get a forced eviction.

C, landlords know that and they're all secretly terrified.

D, this is one of the only times ever that you have any power in late-stage capitalism as a non-owner.

Use it wisely.

Well, it's not D, I disagree with use it wisely.

That's obviously

very terrible.

Yeah, it's C, landlords know that, and they're all secretly terrified.

Well done, correct.

Thank you, thank you.

All right, Tom.

New York might have rid itself of moving day, but we still have plenty of mass immigrations every year.

What are they?

A,

the time Ed Koch released everyone from the mental hospitals at once, creating New York City's homelessness problem.

Oh, Jesus.

B.

The time Rudy Giuliani ordered the NYPD to murder a bunch of those homeless people on Christmas.

Jesus Christ.

Or C,

Santa Con.

C Santa Con.

Santa Con is an abomination.

Oh, it's a really good fucking worst.

It's so bad.

The worst thing that happened in New York in 2001 was Santa Con 2001.

100%.

100%.

Everyone was walking around looking at Santa Con, missing September.

All right.

Well, I got everyone to remember Santa Con, which means I win.

So I get to pick next week's SAS.

And I'll be damned if we're letting Cecil come back to anything but work.

So I want an essay from him next week.

Good chop me.

All right, now for Tom, Noah, Heath, and Cecil, I'm Eli Bosnik.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week, and by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to us wherever you get your toodles.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make it.

Well, that's what you get for changing.

You don't like the breakfast club close.

Maybe now toodles is my thing.

You can change the fucking breakfast club close.

When do we let Heath do things on our show?

When do we ever let him do things on our show?

And if you'd like to help keep this show going,

you can make a point.

Why do you want to help keep this show going?

At patreon.com/slash citationpod.

Don't ask that, Tom, out loud.

Or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

No, you move out of my way.

No,

you move out of my way.

Oh, hey, look, a rich guy who paid extra so he can move tomorrow?

Is that what that means?

Look, that Mexican guy is going first.

Oh, no, you don't, Mexicans.

Mexicans,

you guys are both Mexican, I thought.

They're gone.

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