Cleaning Up New York The '70s Cult Classic

THE EAST VILLAGE, NYC, 1976.

A 26-year-old starving poet needs $60. What else to do but register with a temp agency as a house cleaner? The excitement never wanes as he is catapulted into the everyday yet unimaginable worlds behind closed (apartment) doors.

Bob knows one thing: the dirt will always win. Clients are a bit more unpredictable, he discovers, as he comes to terms with eccentric domestic habits and strange discoveries. When Bob becomes a weekly fixture in his clients’ lives, anything can happen, and does, including a memorable encounter with an obliging Hoover that ultimately proves unable to get the job done. 

Cleaning Up New York has been a cult classic since it was first published in 1976 in an edition of 750.

Bob Rosenthal is a writer and poet who studied under Paul Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Joel Oppenheimer, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley. He worked as Allen Ginsberg’s secretary for twenty years until Ginsberg’s death, was an associate producer on the 2010 film Howl, and currently is a chief advisor to his estate. Rosenthal is working on a chronicle of the business of Allen Ginsberg.