Freshkills Park Blog

Before closing almost two decades ago, Fresh Kills Landfill was known as the largest landfill in the world. During peak operations in the 1980s, Fresh Kills received as much as 29,000 tons of trash per day. By 1991 it was the last remaining landfill in New York City, accepting household trash from all five boroughs.

If you photographed Freshkills Park in 2018, you’re invited to submit your work to the first annual Capturing Change Photography Contest. We’re looking for photographs that illustrate Freshkills Park’s unique engineered landscape from all angles. Submissions will be accepted from January 3, 2019 to February 14, 2019, with winners announced in early March.

Dr. Richard Veit first saw grasshopper sparrows nesting at Freshkills Park in 2015. This was a surprising discovery for Veit, a College of Staten Island researcher who has been studying the site’s grassland bird populations for decades. According to the Breeding Bird Survey, grasshopper sparrow populations have declined by 97% in New York State.

This summer, the inaugural Urban Omnibus writer in residence, Dani Alexander, had the opportunity to roam the future Freshkills Park’s four mounds. By foot and by car, under beating sun and pouring rain, Alexander explored the urban wilds of Staten Island, where highways meet gas wells, herons, and kayakers.

On November 18, Field R/D artist Lize Mogel led two bus tours of the park project. The tours expanded and resituated the typical park tour by offering an artist/ “counter-cartographer’s” perspective. Joined by guides Dr. Cait Field, the Freshkills Park Manager for Science and Research Development, and Mariel Villere, Manager for Programs, Arts and Grants and co-organizer of Field R/D, Lize’s tour explored the landfill-to-park project within a longer trajectory of a changing urban environment.

Dylan Gauthier co-curates Freshkills Park’s Field R/D residency program with Manager for Programs, Arts, and Grants Mariel Villeré. For the past decade or so, Gauthier has been making environmental work around water, including his collective Mare Liberum and What Wilderness, focused on the EPA Superfund designated Newtown Creek.

This year almost 1,000 visitors explored Freshkills Park by bicycle. They rode the four mile loop road around East Park, saw the beautiful grasslands, wetlands, and woodlands, and experienced a Montana-like sky in New York City. Thanks to supporters like you, the Freshkills Park Alliance provides free bikes during events so that everyone has access to these unique opportunities.

This summer Freshkills Park staff and interns partnered with the NYC Parks Wildlife Unit to evaluate differences in ambient noise levels between two areas of the park. To track the noise levels, sound recorders were placed at corresponding locations on North and East Mounds.

In a collaborative effort, Freshkills Park, Parsons School of Design, and Arable Labs are collecting environmental data at the landfill-to-park project and interpreting that information for artistic pursuits and public education. The transdisciplinary “Sound the Mound” project uses remote sensing and GIS technologies developed by Arable Labs to create a sonic engagement that provides both land and data readings such as rainfall, microclimate, and sunlight within the evolving ecology of Freshkills Park.

Freshkills Park is the world’s largest landfill-to-park project, but landfills all over the world have transformed into parkland. In fact, several examples can be found in New York City. Battery Park in Manhattan was built on landfill material, and the site of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens was once a landfill described as a “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby by F.

For the past two years, NYC Parks staff have partnered with the College of Staten Island (CSI) and the Interstate Environmental Commission (IEC) to monitor the water quality within Freshkills Park and study the health of the waterways. This year’s results were consistent with data from last year, which shows great progress in the remediation and restoration of the park.

Windows into Freshkills Park is now on display at two New York Public Library branches! The miniature museum is spread across Staten Island, with two interactive dioramas at the St. George branch and two at the Great Kills branch. The four boxes illustrate Freshkills Park’s environmental history, technologies, wildlife, and evolution as a new public space.

Earlier this year, Dani Alexander was selected as the winner of the Urban Wild Writer Residency. The residency is a collaboration between Urban Omnibus and Freshkills Park that seeks to bring a firsthand perspective to topics like the environment, technology, urban life, nature, and waste.

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” –Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks.

Perfect autumnal weather welcomed hundreds of visitors to the scenery of Freshkills Park on September 30 for Discovery Day.

This month, the Architectural League and Urban Omnibus will open Capturing Change: Freshkills Park, an exhibition of photographs documenting the evolution of the world’s largest landfill-to-park project. Produced by photographers participating in tours led by Freshkills Park staff, the images depict the transformation of the site from a 2,200-acre landfill into a unique urban ecosystem of carefully engineered rolling hills.

In 2018, NYC Parks researchers monitored the fish species in the waterways of Freshkills Park. This ongoing research has helped to document the fish in the creeks since 2016. The data provide insight into the health of the fish populations, as well as the food availability for wading birds like the great egrets and great blue herons seen foraging in the park.

2200 Acres: Field R/D Artists on Regeneration at Freshkills Park
On view September 23, 2018 – February 15, 2019

Freshkills Park: Field R/D is a project to develop a visionary, community-responsive residency program for the former NYC landfill. Through the residency process, artists followed their own paths, developed research methodologies, and posed questions to a range of actors, from city agencies to scholars, scientists, ecologists, and environmental writers.

The NYPL Great Kills and St. George Libraries are presenting a three-session series of community conversations focused on different aspects of Freshkills Park. At 2,200 acres, Freshkills Park is almost three times the size of Central Park and the largest park to be developed in New York City in over 100 years.

By early April, ospreys had arrived at Freshkills Park after spending the winter in warmer places. Nicknamed “fish hawks,” these large raptors like being close to shallow water for easy access to food. The birds quickly got to work building their summer homes on tall platforms close to the creeks.

The Freshkills Park project is located on the west shore of Staten Island. Connected to the rest of New York City by the Staten Island Ferry and Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, this southernmost borough has become increasingly known for its cultural attractions and dining options.