Tags: events

A record 165 runners participated in the 3rd Annual Staten Island Athletic Club (SIAC) Championship Cross-Country Race on Sunday, November 8. SIAC describes this yearly race at Freshkills Park as a chance to run or walk along one of the largest man-made mountains in the world, seeing part of Staten Island that few have seen and encountering wildlife along the way.

On August 29^th and 30^th, Freshkills Park teamed up with CUNY Macaulay Honors College to conduct a BioBlitz of North Park. A BioBlitz is a 24-hr biological survey event aimed at developing a snapshot of as much biodiversity as possible in a given area at a particular time of year.

As Freshkills Park’s programming season is getting underway, so is its volunteer program. From an informational meeting in March to the park’s upcoming Discovery Day, things are just heating up!

March 19th marked Freshkills Park’s first Volunteer Informational meeting at the College of Staten Island.

On September 29^th, Freshkills Park opened its gates to the public for the fourth annual Sneak Peak event and attracted 3,500 people, a steady increase from previous years.

They came on bikes, on ferries, and in cars; with family, with friends.

September 29, 2013 – Save the date!

Since 2010, the Freshkills Park Team, in partnership with the NYC Department of Parks and the New York City Department of Sanitation, has hosted an annual fall “Sneak Peak” to give the public an opportunity to experience the beauty of the Freshkills Park site and to witness its remarkable transformation.

On September 23rd, Freshkills Park hosted our biggest Sneak Peak event yet. The third annual Sneak Peak drew over 2,500 visitors to the North Park section of the future park.

This year’s Sneak Peak featured free bicycle rentals for the first time as a fun way to get around the site more quickly. 

There are three great events coming up this month related to Freshkills Park.

The first is the opening of a new exhibit, From Farm to City: Staten Island 1661-2012, on the history of Staten Island at the Museum of the City of New York.  

Our third annual Sneak Peak event is just one month away!

Sneak Peak is a rare opportunity to go inside the park and preview the incredible transformation of the site. This year’s event will take place on Sunday, September 23rd, from 11 am to 4 pm, and will feature all sorts of fun things to see and do, including birdhouse building, kayaking, kite-flying, bike riding, pony riding, mural painting, bag sewing, instrument making, and much more.

This past weekend, Freshkills Park hosted two lively sets of visitors. On Saturday, Pack 118 of the Staten Island Boys of Scouts of America, explored the South and North Mounds of the park.  This curious group of young Staten Islanders learned about the myriad of wildlife and plant species that make their home at Freshkills Park, as well as the history of the landfill and master plan.  

This Saturday, July 28, the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) will be holding an exclusive sneak preview of the submissions to the 2012 LAGI NYC design competition for Freshkills Park. You’ll learn all about renewable energy technologies, land art and public art, and even design your own energy-generating public artwork.

The 2012 International Urban Parks Conference is around the corner! From July 14th-17th, park professionals, politicians and urban park advocates from around the world will attend “Greater & Greener: Reimagining Parks for 21st Century Cities,” held in New York City. The conference is presented by City Parks Alliance.

Join us on Sunday, July 8, as members of the Freshkills Park team, with assistance from Kayak Staten Island and generous support of the Downtown Boathouse, guide you through the creeks of Freshkills Park via kayak.

The tour will last two hours and is free of charge.

Starting this weekend, NYC Wildflower Week presents a terrific series of events focused on New York’s open space and rich native plant communities. To celebrate, our partners at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island are welcoming the public next Monday, May 14, on a tour of their facilities.

On April 21st, during Earth Day weekend, Freshkills Park hosted our very first volunteer project! Staten Island Boy Scout Packs 5 and 118 (and their parents) tended to the Million Trees planting area in the South Park section of the site.

April is National Poetry Month which means it is time for the fourth annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest!  We will be celebrating by asking you to share your impressions, experiences, thoughts and ideas of what Freshkills Park is, will be, and what it means to you- in haiku form.

This Monday Gelf Magazine, an NYC-based independent webzine “looking over the overlooked”, will host Geeky Garbage, a discussion about one of the most overlooked aspect of our daily lives — waste. On hand will be former Freshkills Park Talks lecturers Robin Nagle (DSNY anthropologist-in-residence) and Howard Warren (expert on the Barren Island/Dead Horse Bay), with Max Liboiron, a trash artist and pollution activist.

Our friends at Discard Studies highly recommend this Thursday’s book launch for Samantha MacBride, author of the recently released Recycling Reconsidered: the Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action (MIT 2012). The listing notes that Samantha’s book “offers a critical yet supportive appraisal of the historical development of recycling in the United States, looking at both materials flows and social significance of this meaningful ecological activity”.

Two new green networks have recently launched that are making participation in sustainability in New York City easier and more accessible.

Change by Us, a website run the Office of the Mayor, allows New Yorkers to post a sticky with an idea for how to make the city “a greener, greater place to live” and has space for people to post information about their projects on the site. 

Join us for our first tour of 2012 as we search for the birds of Freshkills Park along the site’s wetlands, creeks and meadows. This tour, like all of our bi-monthly birding tours, will be held jointly by naturalists from the Staten Island Museum and a member of the Freshkills Park development team.

Tuesday night’s talk at the Arsenal by Marty Bellew was a terrific history of landfills in New York City, culminating with the story of Fresh Kills.  The context of other landfills really brought home the outsize scope of operations at Fresh Kills–no other site in the city even came close to the same acreage and garbage volume.