By JEFF VANDAM

AT the end of May, when a film student named Alex Winckler vacated his studio apartment on West 113th Street, he decided, as many other students do at the end of the school year, to just dump his old furniture on the sidewalk.


He hauled each item, one by one, down the stairs, depositing on the street first a fauxmahogany table, then matching chairs he had acquired from a Salvation Army store, then a $50 sofa-bed that, once beige, had turned grayish blue, and finally a deceptively heavy desk.

As he did so, Mr. Winckler noticed something curious. By the time he got each new item downstairs, the one previously deposited had disappeared. It was as though mysterious scavengers were waiting just out of sight, poised to make off with his leavings the moment he headed back upstairs.

The entire process took about 20 minutes.

“West 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam is not a major thoroughfare,” the still-incredulous Mr. Winckler said recently, speaking by phone from London, his hometown. “There’s a regular stream of pedestrian traffic, but it’s not like Fifth Avenue or wherever.”

Mr. Winckler, 25, who had nearly completed his master’s degree in film at Columbia, was itching to empty his apartment and get back home. A few young women had asked him to spend his vacation with them in Cornwall.

Among the other items Mr. Winckler left on the street were a fan, a TV/stereo stand (“the only nice piece of furniture, really”) and a futon. Curiously, it appeared that one person had need for a futon frame and another for a mattress, as they disappeared at different times. When it came time to claim the desk, however, professionals came calling.

“A van was waiting there,” Mr. Winckler said.

Men measured the desk and the width of the door of the van, which was unmarked, and they spoke heatedly in a foreign language.

“They looked a bit sheepish about the whole thing,” Mr. Winckler said. “But they saw me coming out, and they said, ‘Is this yours?’ ”

The van, it turned out, was too small to accommodate the desk, so the men, using a cellphone, apparently called in a request for a bigger vehicle. Soon, the desk, like the rest of Mr. Winckler’s belongings, was gone.