MANHATTAN, New York—Central Park has long been an icon of New York City life, a calm in the undying rush of the city. However, it has become heavily polluted by the large number of people who frequent it everyday — the once beautiful landmark has been turned into an enormous landfill, seemingly irreversibly. That is, until a few dozen students from public high schools in the city decided to do something about it.

          Students snuck into the park overnight and began cleaning, picking up soda cans and stray plastic from around the park. They climbed trees and threw out eggs that tourists had likely hidden in birds’ nests. They even removed much of the unwelcome wildlife that had established a home in the dirty park, capturing and removing rats, squirrels, birds, and other vermin. Overall, the students removed tons of garbage from all over the park, and now it looks new again. People walking through the park after the cleanup commented on how cleansed the whole park looked. One jogger commented on the new look of the park, saying, “Yeah, it looks way cleaner I guess. Wait, didn’t there used to be, like, animals in the park? What the hell happened?” Students also cut down and removed hundreds of trees so the sunlight would not be blocked out of the park and people would be able to see the park’s beauty better.

          The Rikers Times also reached out to students involved in the park cleanup. One student from The Bronx High School of Science, Miguel Vivar, who is also the presumptive valedictorian for the 2020 school year, said, “Yeah, we just wanted to do something nice for the community. We started from the bottom of the park at 59th street and just cleaned all the way to the top. Central Park has long needed a facelift and we were happy to put in the work for the good people of the city.” When asked about what happened to all the tons of garbage that were removed from the park, Vivar said he could not comment on that and quickly hung up the phone on us, asserting he had to go feed his new pet squirrels. We’re confident that the students disposed of the trash in a respectful and environmentally friendly manner.

          In unrelated news, the NYPD has reported that an enormous mass of garbage appeared seemingly overnight in the Hudson River, right around 11oth street. There is no evidence as to where this hunk of trash may have come from. The NYC Police Commissioner Dermot Shea commented that “the trash would be enough to fill up Central Park,” and he has many detectives searching for possible perpetrators.