Can-collecting Brooklyn bag lady is really a multimillionaire
An eccentric Brooklyn woman who drives a rundown graffiti-covered car, collects cans and pushes a laundry cart full of plastic bags is worth more than $8 million. Lisa Fiekowski’s trash-filled 1993 Toyota Camry has been a source of complaints in Prospect Heights for years, according to the New York Post.
However, Fiekowski (whom Business Insider says is also known as Lisa Silversmith) has an MBA from the University of Chicago and owns a $1 million co-op near Prospect Park as well as three Harlem properties on tree-lined blocks. “Like Fiekowski’s sloppy jalopy, her uninhabitable investment properties are filled with junk,” the Post reported.
After Fiekowski, the daughter of two high-powered Washington, D.C. economists, came to New York in 1979, she first worked as a marketing analyst at AT&T and then, briefly, as a stockbroker. A decade ago, however, she took up collecting cans, which brings her $20 to $30 a day, as a hobby. “It keeps me active. I talk to people in the neighborhood,” she told the Post. Her upscale family doesn’t approve of her lifestyle – her husband, whom the Post did not name, earns a yearly salary of $180,000 working for the city, and her mother, who negotiated trade deals worldwide, knew Condoleezza Rice personally.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.