Time gone by
Monday, March 22nd marked the nine year anniversary of the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill. To reflect on that milestone, we pulled this timeline (PDF, 11MB) of the landfill’s operation from our archives. It was put together for the catalogue of the exhibit called “Fresh Kills: Artists Respond to the Closure of the Staten Island Landfill,” mounted at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center‘s Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in 2001.
The timeline doesn’t include every pertinent piece of information, of course. One important addition: in 1990, Governor Mario Cuomo signed a consent order placing the Fresh Kills Landfill under the governance of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC); under that governance, the Department of Sanitation installed state-of-the-art infrastructure throughout the site to capture landfill gas emissions, collect and purify leachate and monitor the landfill’s impacts on surrounding air and water quality. These systems continue to operate today. More information on the site’s infrastructure and environmental controls is available under the ‘About the Site’ tab on the Freshkills Park home page.
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