The band in action.   (Photo: Courtesy of The New York City Department Of Sanitation Emerald Society Pipes And Drums Band)

Wedged between two cemeteries on 58th Street in Maspeth, Queens, up a ramp and past a security guard’s booth, 18 members of the New York City Department of Sanitation’s band, the Emerald Society Pipes & Drums, are circled beneath an American flag. Facing two bass drummers in the center is retiree Bryant Small, the band’s 53-year-old blond-­mustachioed drum major.

Small joined the Sanitation Department in 1989 and soon became a district delegate for the Emerald Society, a group of civil servants with Irish heritage. Back then, music for the funerals of any of the department’s 7,200 members was provided by the NYPD Emerald Society’s band. “It just looked ridiculous,” Small says. “We had sanitation, and we’re all in green, and you’ve got these guys in blue doing these funerals.” To add to the insult, every March 17, when the Emerald Society departmental delegates marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, “I noticed that we were hiring a high-school band from Long Island to lead us up [Fifth] Avenue,” remembers Small, who had played drums since he was 15. “Eventually, some of us were saying, ‘Wait a minute, police have a band, fire has a band, corrections has a band. Back then, transit police had a band. How come we don’t have a band?’ ” Small and about a dozen of his colleagues launched Pipes & Drums in 1993. Quickly, though, the new band encountered a problem: “The pipers, God bless ’em, none of them had ever played a musical instrument before.” Nor could they read music, says Small. With the help of two instructors from the NYPD, the band started taking regular lessons as a group. “You’ve got to blow at the same time as you’re squeezing,” says Roger Leahy, the 44-year-old bagpipe major who joined the DSNY in 1992 and admits he initially peeved his neighbors with his practicing. “It’s a really unique instrument.” The complete band was not deemed “street ready” until March 17, 1995.

These days, the band’s schedule of about 50 events per year may include weddings, funerals, minor-league baseball games, street-naming ceremonies, and 9/11 commemorations. The 40-plus-member band has also participated in four ticker-tape parades: two for the Giants, one for the Yankees, and one this year for the U.S. women’s soccer team. Often after practice, the men — who are each required to memorize between 50 and 60 songs — will repair to Donovan’s, an Irish pub down the street, for burgers and Guinness. Eddie Hicks, 45, who was elected bandmaster in 2012, likens the band’s camaraderie to that of a sports team. On rides to events, “the bus kind of becomes that locker room,” he says. “Everybody’s friends with everybody, whether there’re people making fun of each other or we’re just joking around.” He’s thankful for appreciative listeners, who are “treating us as if we’re doing them a favor, but really they’re doing us a favor, because as players, all you want to do is make people happy.”