Photographer Nathan Kensinger has posted a set of terrific photos and his impressions of the Freshkills Park site, collected during our photographers’ tour last month.  We’ve been doing these tours every few months; if you’re a professional photographer interested in participating in future photo tours, feel free to be in touch.

Recently opened Concrete Plant Park, in the Bronx, sits on the seven-acre site of a concrete plant that operated from the late 1940s through 1987.  The park has retained some of its industrial past in the form of newly-painted silos, hoppers and conveyors, structures that once served as mixing facilities and now distinguish the park as sculptural monuments to the site’s evolution. 

Since the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, districts outside of New York City, and as far as Virginia and Ohio, have become destinations for the city’s garbage.  Just north of Philadelphia, a 6,000-acre complex of Bucks County landfills–in Tullytown, Falls Township and Morrisville, PA–receive about 2,500 tons of New York City’s trash each day. 

Hey! I’m Walkin’ Here! presents another Staten Island group walk tomorrow, Saturday, November 7th, roaming 15 miles of the island’s south shore.  Lots of beach walking and some rock scrambling involved; dress for the temperature and wear sturdy shoes. Participation is free, and Saturday’s walk will start with a meetup underneath the first S in the Staten Island Ferry sign outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Manhattan at 8:45 am.

Inspired by the success of the High Line, proposals to reimagine abandoned rail lines have popped up all over the country.

• Faced with the replacement of a section of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, Rael San Fratello Architects have proposed the creation of the Bay Line, a hanging neighborhood complete with housing, cultural and commercial buildings and bike and pedestrian paths. 

This Friday, journalist and land policy expert Anthony Flint will be discussing and signing his new book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City at the Greenbelt Nature Center on Staten Island. 

New York Times feature Entry Level profiles Freshkills Park’s Programming and Grants Manager, Raj Kottamasu.  In addition to being part of the planning and implementation team for the project, Raj works with artists to develop onsite projects, initiates and organizes programs and events, manages and seeks grants for park projects and edits and designs our publications.

The New York Times runs down recent initiatives aimed at making New York City parks more accessible and accommodating to immigrants.  These efforts have been accelerating as a result of the city’s language-access plan and a report from New Yorkers for Parks called Parks for All New Yorkers: Immigrants, Culture and NYC Parks. 

Last week, the Parks Department’s Freshkills Park team and Staten Island Urban Park Rangers took a canoe trip through the site’s creeks and wetlands.  We put in at “The Point,” near the Isle of Meadows, and headed east through Fresh Kills Creek to Main Creek, where we got up close and personal with the William T.

Submissions to NYC BigApps are currently being accepted for software applications that make the City’s data sets accessible and usefully legible to the public, with the goals of  fostering greater accountability and transparency of government operations as well as providing better tools for public policy advocacy and grassroots action. 

The City of New York recently signed an agreement with Natural Currents Energy Group that will put a renewable energy generation park on the southern tip of Ward’s Island, near the Triborough (RFK) Bridge.  The park will include four 100 kilowatt tidal turbines, a 140 foot wind turbine and 800 square feet of solar panels, generating, in total, enough energy to power 100 homes. 

The American Planning Association has released its top ten list of great public spaces for 2009.  #1 is New Haven Green in New Haven, Connecticut, which, it seems, was selected as much for its aesthetics as for its political significance:

General George Washington spoke here during the American Revolution.

Wednesday the 28th, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) will host a discussion called The Infrastructure of Urban Ecologies.  Speakers will include William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons, and Kazys Varnelis, Director of Network Architecture Lab at GSAPP. 

The New York Times surveys the growth of “zero waste” strategies in the US among private companies, institutions and entire municipalities.  “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” are really coming of age: biodegradable utensils, large-scale composting and citywide, warehouse-like free swap shops.  And it’s not just hippies and treehuggers participating anymore.

The Council on the Environment of New York City and the Staten Island Compost Project will be co-hosting a recycling and home composting workshop this Saturday afternoon at the St. George Library on Staten Island.  Tin can tricks and live worm bins, fun for all ages.  

Four giant coal gasometers, built as part of Vienna’s municipal gas works in the late 1800s, have been refashioned into a complex of residential, commercial and municipal facilities.  Formerly Europe’s largest gas plant, the gasometers now house 800 apartments, a student dormitory, a music hall, over 70 shops, restaurants, bars and cafes, a movie theater and the city’s municipal archive.

Researchers at the University of Milan Bicocca in Monza, Italy are working to harvest energy offset by the mixture of fresh and salt water.  The process uses electrodes to draw apart positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chlorine ions in salt water, then forces those ions away from the electrodes by flooding them with fresh water. 

UbuWeb, the large online archive of avant-garde art, has posted a streaming video of Gordon Matta-Clark‘s 1972 “Freshkill,” filmed at the Fresh Kills Landfill.  The short film depicts the destruction of the artist’s truck by a bulldozer.  The video is also available for download as an MP4.

Greenmuseum interviews Terry Hazen, Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology and the Head of Ecology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about bioremediation, its benefits and its hazards.  Hazen is a well-spoken expert on the subject of remediating contaminated sites and the microorganisms that can be used to do so. 

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project aims to build awareness of the economic benefits of biodiversity by quantifying the costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to offer strategies developed through science, economics and policy to move toward net growth in biodiversity.