The Cleanest Blocks in NYC Aren't Where You'd Expect

About Cleanest Streets & Avenues

Our cleanliness score counts 311 sanitation reports, the dirty sidewalks and overflowing baskets and missed collections, against the number of people on a street and ranks each street against others of its kind. What we measure is how often somebody called it in, which is a proxy for how the block is kept rather than a direct reading of it. The borough order is not the one most people would guess. Queens posts the best cleanliness average in the city at 56 and Brooklyn the worst at 45, with Manhattan a single point above Brooklyn. The Bronx and Queens between them supply more than half of the city's 200 best-scoring streets on this measure. Cleanliness is also the column most likely to disagree with a street's overall grade: Manhattan Avenue is one of the highest-graded streets in Greenpoint and one of the dirtiest.