City gardener blasts litterbugs in curse-filled tirade after San Francisco Pride celebration
Trash was strewn as far as the eye could see. It covered the grass and hung from palm trees. Packs of seagulls flew from pile to pile, picking at the garbage like vultures on a carcass.
As Mark Lujan wheeled his utility vehicle through San Francisco’s Dolores Park recently, the city gardener uttered a string of curse words.
Then he took to social media give the litterbugs a piece of his mind.
In a video introduced with an expletive and captioned “Post pride,” the Parks and Recreation Department employee shows what the Mission District park looked like on Monday morning after a weekend Pride celebration that involved the annual Dyke March that drew thousands.
If that wasn’t enough to get his point across, Lujan posted an even more expletive-filled screed on Facebook that blasted “awful” people and called a city outreach program to keep Dolores Park clean “useless.”
The post has since been deleted from Lujan’s Facebook account, but a version of it was saved by the website SFist.
(Warning: The video below contains explicit language.)
In the post, Lujan voiced frustration that while there were “almost 30 trashcans a mere 20 yards away,” parkgoers still dropped their trash on the ground.
“They’re bolted to the ground,” Lujan wrote of the trash cans in the now-deleted post. “Frankly people just should not be so … awful. You can literally see the trash cans from this field. Oh and there are signs that say where the cans are. Oh and we also waste a bunch of effort on the obviously useless love Dolores outreach campaign to inform people. The solution is for people to just maybe start giving a … or two. But instead they choose to use this park like a literal … dumpster.”
The gardener also complained of picking up a “statistically significant number of drug baggies and condoms,” which were “usually found near a pile of vomit.”
“I AM NOT A … TRASH MAN,” Lujan wrote. “I’m a gardener.”
City officials confirmed to SFist that Lujan is a city employee and said that on Monday alone, it took more than a dozen employees more than 86 hours to clean the park. Dolores Park reopened after a $20-million renovation in January.
For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
