NYC Tops List of Dirtiest Cities: Poll

New York City took the top spot in a Travel + Leisure magazine poll naming the dirtiest cities in America.

The magazine polled 50,000 people online to rate 35 American cities, and this year New York City rose to number one after ranking “a tidier number five last year,” says the magazine.

Following New York was New Orleans, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

The New York Daily News, hearing the results, reached out to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a reply.

“Sounds like the people in this survey haven't been here in a long while,” mayoral spokeswoman Julie Wood told the paper. 

The city’s 50 million tourists last year, she added, “saw for themselves that the city is cleaner than ever.”

According to the paper, a recent Sanitation Department report rated the city’s streets at a 95% cleanliness, up from 70% in the 1970s.

Still, other cities “don't have the same smell of (urine) and the rodent problem that you have here,” Derek Snow, a recent city transplant from Boston, told the paper. “But if you want the extremely awesome, you have to take the extremely bad.”

In August, Bed-Stuy Patch started a discussion on the cleanliness of the neighborhood, route: {:controller=>"articles", :action=>"show", :id=>"bed-stuy-not-pigsty"} -->, and found that residents were overwhelmingly unhappy with trash in the streets, and