What a Dump! A Deleted Reddit Comment and the Alley It Named

Title: What a Dump! (Bellingcat Challenge, Urban Exploration series, by Jake)

Description: Sometimes the most interesting things are found in the most unexpected places… but sometimes those places are full of trash. This dumpster is in an alley somewhere, but where?

Question: Where was the photographer standing when they took this photo? Use latitude and longitude in decimal format with three decimals.

The answer, up front: the photographer stood in the alley between 4th and 5th Streets NE, off Morse Street NE in the Union Market district of Washington, D.C., looking up the alley toward the skyline. The exact coordinates are below.

38.910, -76.998

The whole brief. An alley, a dumpster, a lot of graffiti, and no sign that names the place.

This one isn’t solved by eye. The quickest route is to notice that the graffiti in the photo is documented somewhere, find who documented it, and read the location off them. The catch — and the point of the writeup — is that the location had been deleted, and getting it back is the actual work.

Step 1: What the photo gives you

No street sign, no house number. What it does contain:

• Handwritten tags on the dumpster: Howard U and GUILT PARADE.
• A large wall piece reading GOOF on the right-hand brick wall — the crew Goof Troop.
• A steel bridge crossing the alley in the mid-distance, the kind of overhead link old market and rail terminals have.
• A Waste Management “8yd” container (an 8-cubic-yard commercial dumpster).
• A city skyline at the far end of the alley.

The tags are the lead. Howard U and a crew name are the kind of text that graffiti photographers index and discuss — so somewhere there is almost certainly a post about this exact wall.

False lead: the metadata and the dumpster number

Before the graffiti, two things in and on the file look like shortcuts. Both are dead ends, and it’s worth saying why, because one of them is a trap you can sink hours into.

The file metadata. Running exiftool on the challenge image (dumpster.jpg) returns almost nothing — no GPS, no camera, no timestamp. The one field that survives is an IPTC tag:

OriginalTransmissionReference : uvUYenqpJLtDyoJW-PtG

That’s not a clue. A 20-character random string in this field is what a social platform stamps on an image when it re-encodes an upload and strips everything else. It tells you the file probably passed through a platform; it does not reverse-look-up to a post, an account, or a place.

The number on the dumpster. The WM sticker carries a phone number, partly covered by spray paint (800-?34-2805). It’s tempting to read it as a per-container ID and look it up. It isn’t: it’s a shared 1-800 service line, printed identically on thousands of WM containers in a region, and it resolves to a call centre, not a location. WM does run a developer API (apitest.wm.com/v1), but it needs credentials WM issues to contract partners and returns customer account data — not a public reverse lookup, and not somewhere to go uninvited. The challenge is built to be solved from open sources, and it is.

Step 2: Reverse image search to the graffiti

Action. Google Lens on the photo, then a plain search for the crew:

goof troop graffiti

The visual matches lead off the challenge and into where this graffiti actually lives — Instagram and graffiti forums — and the search for the crew name lands on a post in the subreddit r/Bombing titled, simply, GOOF TROOP, from June 2018.

Step 3: The location was there — and deleted

The r/Bombing thread is full of people working the same Bellingcat challenge. Several had already pinned the city from the Howard U and GUILT PARADE tags and the Goof Troop piece. But the comments that named the spot are gone: the subreddit’s mods remove anything more specific than a city.

r/Bombing’s rule, and a [removed] comment right where the location used to be. “Yeah shortly after, that bin corner lol” confirms a location comment existed and was taken down.

The live thread shows [removed]. The Wayback Machine is the usual next step, but a capture only preserves the comment if the snapshot predates the deletion — and here it didn’t help.

Step 4: Arctic Shift recovers the deleted comment

Removed Reddit comments aren’t necessarily gone. Arctic Shift is a public archive of Reddit data (the project that carries on from Pushshift), and it keeps the body of comments that were later removed on Reddit itself.

Action. Take the post’s base-36 ID from its URL (t3_8qti01) and run an ID lookup:

https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=ids&ids=t3_8qti01

The archive returns the full thread, including the comments Reddit now shows as [removed].

Among the recovered comments is the one the mod had deleted:

The deleted answer, intact in the archive: “Morse St Aly, Union Market district, Washington DC.”

That’s the location, handed over by the people who solved it first. It still has to be checked and turned into a precise camera position — an archived comment is a lead, not proof.

Step 5: Two Morse Streets — pick the right one

Searching “Morse St NE” drops you in the wrong place. There are two stretches of Morse Street NE on the same line in north-east D.C.:

• the eastern, residential stretch out by Gallaudet University in Trinidad — rowhouses, no alley like this, no rail bridge;
• the western stretch at Union Market, the old wholesale market terminal — brick market halls, a rail viaduct, modern glass buildings behind. That’s the one.

The Union Market anchor is the food hall at 1309 5th St NE; the alley runs north off Morse Street NE between 4th and 5th St NE.

Step 6: Street View, the exact spot

Action. Google Maps Street View in the alley between 4th and 5th St NE, off Morse Street NE, looking up the alley.

Top: the challenge. Bottom: Street View from the same alley. The steel overhead bridge across the alley, the brick wall on the right, the metal-clad building on the left and the skyline at the end all line up.

What fixes it:

• The steel bridge crossing the alley in the mid-distance — the Union Market Terminal’s overhead link, hard to mistake.
• The alley geometry: a long straight alley running between two parallel streets (4th and 5th NE), opening toward the skyline.
• The walls: old brick on the right, metal-clad market building on the left, both still carrying heavy graffiti.

The camera stood near the Morse Street end, looking up the alley — about 38.910, -76.998.

Verification

Three confirmations, none of them the same source twice:

1. An independent archival photo of the same alley. The Library of Congress holds a documentation photo captioned “Alley between 4th and 5th streets, NE looking from Morse Street, NE towards Neal Place, NE” (LoC, Union Market, 1309 5th St NE). That is this alley and this viewing direction, recorded by a source that has nothing to do with graffiti or the challenge.
2. The fixed structure. The steel overhead bridge and the market-hall walls are permanent features visible in current Street View from the same position.
3. The recovered comment. The deleted r/Bombing comment, restored from Arctic Shift, named the same alley before any of the visual matching.

The moment of certainty is the overhead bridge. Plenty of DC alleys have brick walls and dumpsters; one with a steel viaduct crossing it mid-block, between 4th and 5th NE off Morse Street, is a single place.

The alternative, excluded. The other Morse Street NE — the residential stretch in Trinidad, out by Gallaudet — has rowhouses and no such alley or bridge. It matches the street name and nothing else.

Answer

38.910, -76.998

The alley between 4th and 5th Streets NE, off Morse Street NE, Union Market, Washington, D.C.

Takeaways

• Reverse image search doesn’t just find the place — it finds the people who already found it. Graffiti, in particular, is photographed, tagged and discussed; the crew name was the search term that led straight to a thread of people who’d done the geolocation.
• “Removed” is not “gone.” A Reddit comment deleted by a moderator still shows [removed] on the live site, but its body often survives in Arctic Shift (the successor to Pushshift). Take the post or comment’s base-36 ID from the URL and look it up there. The Wayback Machine only helps if a snapshot predates the deletion; the Reddit data archives don’t have that limit.
• Know the local address system before you search. D.C.’s quadrants (NE/NW/SE/SW) mean the same street name can appear twice on one line. Dropping a name into a map without the context sent me to the wrong Morse Street.
• A dead end is worth stating as one. The stripped metadata and the dumpster’s phone number both look like shortcuts and are neither. Naming them saves the next person the detour — and the one that looks most like a shortcut (a “lookup” against a company’s private API) is the one to leave alone.

Tooling

Arctic Shift for the removed-comment recovery — ID Lookup mode with the post’s t3_<id>. No account needed; it also has post/comment search and bulk download.

Sources

• Bellingcat Challenge 12: What a Dump!
• Challenge image, original file
• Google Lens, visual matches for the graffiti
• Arctic Shift — ID lookup for t3_8qti01, recovered r/Bombing thread
• Library of Congress — Alley between 4th and 5th Sts NE, Union Market
• Google Maps Street View, Morse St NE alley