The Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Science recently released a report finding that polluted and damaged ecosystems have the potential to recover within a lifetime (average of 46 years), or even as little as a decade. Researchers studied 240 sites affected by both natural and human-induced disturbances and concluded that, with adequate restoration and cleanup work, even a heavily polluted ecosystem can revitalize itself.

The New York City Department of Transportation has created a free Google map of the locations of almost all (over 6,000) of the outdoor bike racks in New York City, and some indoor and covered racks. 

On Staten Island, the bulk of these are along the Bay St/Richmond Rd and Victory Blvd/Richmond Ave corridors, the latter of which will eventually lead you into Freshkills Park. 

The first section, anyway–running between Gansevoort Street and West 20th Street.  Design of the formerly-abandoned-elevated-rail-line-turned-chic-urban-park was led by Field Operations, the landscape architecture and urban design firm that’s also designing Freshkills Park.

Lots of photos and coverage of the High Line’s opening in the New York Times, Curbed, Gothamist, DesignNotes and the High Line blog.

The 30-acre Bethlehem Steel Mill on Lake Erie was in operation for almost 80 years and was closed in the mid-1970s.  Contaminated with steel slag and industrial waste, the site was idle for 30 years.  In May 2002, the EPA awarded the City of Lackawanna a $200,000 grant to investigate the site’s potential for reuse. 

Integrating solar and wind power capture into natural and urban environments isn’t just a technical or engineering task–it’s also a design opportunity.  Some recent eye-popping ideas have ranged from a dragonfly-shaped urban farm on Roosevelt Island to a snakeskin-like PV-tiled stadium in Taiwan.

We get a lot of raised eyebrows when we first talk about the Freshkills Park Project with the uninitiated.  Some folks are put off by the idea of landfills in general, and some are familiar with the stigma the site has given Staten Island over the past half century.

[vimeo vimeo.com/4854719]

The newest episode of PBS Thirteen’s online video series The City Concealed features Freshkills Park.  Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh gives a guided tour of the site and its history, punctuating the scenic drive with a look around the landscape of the future South Park and a view into the Department of Sanitation’s waste byproduct treatment facilities.

The Hiriya landfill in Tel Aviv, a 2,000-acre site adjacent to the city’s airport, has a lot in common with the Freshkills Park site.  From 1952 to 1999, the landfill was Israel’s largest garbage disposal site, at one point receiving one third of the country’s waste. 

For the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival at Manahatta Island, the Wildlife Conservation Society and ecologist Eric W. Sanderson have prepared the Manahatta Project, a massive GIS-based portrait of the topography and ecology of Manhattan as it was in 1609.

Our big thanks to Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from Field Operations for last Thursday’s Freshkills Park Talk on designing the park. Jerome delivered a great primer on landscape architecture (including a history in two slides!) and talked about the mandate for new model of practice given the nature of the site and the enormity of the project, both in space and time scale.

[vimeo vimeo.com/4951004]

Last week, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) hosted a panel called Urban Parks in the Twenty-First Century: Creating a New Model.  Park designers, administrators and other experts discussed the some of New York City’s most innovative new park projects: Concrete Plant Park  in the South Bronx, Riverside South on the Upper West Side, and, of course, Freshkills Park.  

Yesterday we were treated to a tour of the Staten Island Transfer Station (SITS) by Tom Killeen, the Department of Sanitation’s Director of Fresh Kills.  SITS is a 79,000 sq ft complex opened in 2006 and is responsible for the processing ALL of Staten Island’s residential waste. 

This week Mayor Bloomberg signed legislation to establish a comprehensive wetlands strategy by for New York City by 2012. The Mayor emphasized at a public hearing on Tuesday that protecting wetlands (of which there are many at the Freshkills Park site) is a high priority of PlaNYC 2030. 

Another volunteer opportunity on Staten Island, removing invasive weeds, watering and mulching at Ocean Breeze Park this weekend:

Natural Resources Group: Stewardship Day
Ocean Breeze Park
Saturday, May 30, 9 am-2 pm

Sign up is through the Million Trees website, along with more Million Trees volunteer events on Staten Island and throughout the city.

Just a reminder about this evening’s talk at the Staten Island Museum.  Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from landscape architecture and urban design firm Field Operations will be discussing the ideas behind the design of Freshkills Park and their work on upcoming projects. 

The 2009 Art by the Ferry Festival on Staten Island kicks off June 6th.  For the first two weekends in June, the Staten Island Creative Community will animate the Staten Island Museum, restaurants, and galleries in the St. George neighborhood with visual arts, crafts, spoken word and performing arts events.

There are still seats available for this Sunday’s 10 am bird-focused bus and walking tour of the Freshkills Park site.  Our bird tours are held bimonthly and are jointly led by park planners from our office and naturalists from the Staten Island Museum. 

New York City throws over 3,000 tons of organic matter into landfills every day.  Time to start composting!  Craft-zine’s blog offers a guide to setting yourself up for indoor, home vermicomposting; the Lower East Side Ecology Center offers supplies and more information on composting in general. 

A nice little segment about Freshkills Park has been posted on the NBC Nightly News site.

An interesting public-private partnership in renewable energy production and use: at the Pennsauken Sanitary Landfill in New Jersey, the rooftops of a landfill gas-to-energy plant and a nearby aluminum extrusion factory are occupied by a photovoltaic array.  Some of the energy generated by the array is used to draw methane gas out of the landfill and into the gas-to-energy plant.