The site visit to Freshkills deserved its own post(s) because of the monumental scale of the project.
If you're not familiar with Fresh Kills, it is essentially a collaboration between the NYC Parks Department, the NYC Department of Sanitation, and Field Operations to turn the largest landfill on earth into a wild urban park.
There's really two things about this project; one is that Fresh Kills (landfill) itself is kind of a mind blowing place, which I'll get to in a second. The second is that Fresh Kills (park) arguably transcends what a park is, or perhaps redefines the notion of "park" for the 21st century.
First, Fresh Kills (landfill). Here's a few videos, one of which I shot of the official NYC Parks Dep't tour (the site is still not open to the public). They are still capping the last mound, which was re-opened for the 9/11 WTC debris (including human remains, hence a 9/11 memorial will be on site).
Visible from space, the landfill was/is arguably the most monumental structure in NYC, and also arguably the largest man made structure of all time. It is also an ode to our consumer society that the greatest structure it has produced was merely an accumulation of its own waste material, produced as an afterthought, out of sight and out of mind of society at large.
The closing of the dump, as the second video mentions a bit, is worth expounding upon. While surely hazardous to the people of Staten Island, the dump had the capacity to function for several more decades, and was primarily closed as a political favor by Giuliani to his large Republican constituency on Staten Island. Waste management in NYC has actually gotten objectively environmentally worse since the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill.
According to the NYC parks department tour, each borough now handles its own waste separately. In Staten Island's case, waste is still collected at the Fresh Kills Sanitation Terminal, which used to be the end point for all the waste in NYC. Now, however, it is put on trains and sent to SOUTH CAROLINA, which presumably has cheaper land and looser environmental regulations.
The orange trains cars in this photo are packed with Staten Island trash, headed for South Carolina.
Interestingly enough, Staten Island's South Carolina rail connection is actually the most efficient of the boroughs, when you consider that Manhattan sends all of its garbage by DIESEL TRUCK, out of Manhattan. Some, it should be said, is incinerated in New Jersey, which I guess could be seen as preferable to transport and landfill in South Carolina, which is what happens to the remainder of NYC's most famous Borough's garbage.
next: Field Operations and NYC Parks' department turn this mountain of garbage into a wilderness recreation area....
