Freshkills Park Blog

By Tracey Porpora – Staten Island Advance

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Doug Dicks, a 19-year veteran of the FDNY who currently works at Ladder 78, said he never knows what his day will be like when he walks in the door of the New Brighton firehouse.

The Freshkills Park development team is seeking a motivated and energetic candidate to manage, develop and deliver the educational programming for Freshkills Park and to oversee our growing volunteer program. This position requires working at both 100 Gold Street in Manhattan and Freshkills Park in Staten Island.

This spring, Freshkills Park will be home to a shipping container converted into a studio and project space. The container, known as Fastnet, will be fitted with desks and chairs to accommodate outdoor observational drawing workshops, primarily for high school students.

This month, artists Stefani Bardin and Assaf Tamir are offering workshops as part of their exhibition, the Fantastic Voyage. The immersive installation at the Freshkills Park Studio + Gallery explores the role of food production in our personal health and the health of the environment.

Are you or someone you know an experienced kayaker looking to volunteer this year? If so, we are currently encouraging capable individuals with enthusiasm for Freshkills Park to volunteer during kayak tours!

Volunteers will be responsible for assisting NYC Parks staff with water support during kayaking trips along the site’s tidal waterways.

Madeleine Levin is serving as Freshkills Park’s Public Art Program Intern. She grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is home to the World’s Smallest Park, and she is currently a senior at Columbia University majoring in Urban Studies.

What are you working on?

Applications are due May 1, 2018 at 11:59 PM. For full details and instructions, visit the Urban Omnibus page.

Urban Omnibus announces a new opportunity for an Urban Wild Writer in partnership with NYC Parks and the Freshkills Park Alliance.

Earlier this month, Freshkills Park returned to the annual NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) New York Art Fair as a cultural partner alongside over 100 other exhibitors hailing from 19 countries. The fair, held March 8-11, brought together emerging galleries, artists, and projects at Skylight Clarkson Square in West SoHo.

The Freshkills Park Development team is seeking a motivated and energetic candidate to deliver the park’s seasonal calendar of activities & events. The Seasonal Programming Associate will help coordinate and lead hiking, kayaking, canoeing, birding, special events, and tours at a one of a kind park.

As spring arrives and New York City becomes greener and warmer, tours and events will offer unique opportunities to enjoy the outdoors at Freshkills Park! Whether kayaking through the creeks, photographing the landscape, or hiking and bicycling along miles of meadows, these programs invite the public to learn about the landfill-to-park project and explore sections of the park before they open.

Back in October, we teamed up with Projectivity to request Freshkills Park t-shirt designs for the 2018 season of programs and events. We received nearly two dozen submissions with a range of creative interpretations on the call for designs.

The contest judges were Director of Projectivity Christian Penn, art consultant Monica Valenzuela, and Deputy Director of Public Art for NYC Parks Jennifer Lantzas.

At five o’clock in the morning, a team of researchers enter Freshkills Park, passing flare stations and winding through the roads that border the park’s rolling hills to get to their workstation. The sun is just beginning to break as they unfurl their mist nets in an opening in a stand of trees and set up a table with tiny metal bands, clamps, clipboards, scales, rulers, and pencils.

Freshkills Park’s ongoing Field R/D project has been named one of sixty awardees of the Rubin Foundation’s grants toward their Art and Social Justice Initiative. This re­search and development phase of the expansive and collaborative art-research project began through artist conversations and visits to Freshkills Park over the course of 2017.

Windows into Freshkills from Slanted Studios on Vimeo.

Windows into Freshkills Park is complete and ready for exhibition! The project is a miniature museum with four interactive dioramas that tell stories of environmental history, technologies, and wildlife at Freshkills Park and its evolution as a new public space.

Storm surges reached near record highs in Boston during an intense winter storm early this year. Storms are being seen with increasing strength and frequency throughout the country, and they’re being coupled with increasing costs of repairs and restorations. This has given rise to creative mitigation strategies to limit the impact of severe weather events.

“The Fantastic Voyage”
On view January 21 – June 8, 2018
2240 Richmond Avenue, Staten Island, NY

Stefani Bardin and Assaf Tamir’s “The Fantastic Voyage” is an immersive installation exploring the role of food production in our personal health and the health of the environment.

On December 12, Robin Nagle gave a talk “Victory Boulevard, For Real” at the Sunview Luncheonette in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The talk focused on the history of Fresh Kills Landfill and the transformation into Freshkills Park from an anthropologist’s perspective, situating the story of site regeneration in the history, culture, and systems of garbage in New York.

In November of 2017, Freshkills Park celebrated the groundbreaking at North Park. The event signaled the start of construction on the 21-acre project, which will be the first section inside the Fresh Kills Landfill boundaries to become public parkland. This milestone was possible thanks in part to the growing community that is engaging with the project and participating in scheduled programs. 

The 2017 Christmas Bird Count took place in Staten Island on Saturday, December 16. As part of this yearly tradition, Staten Islanders spread across the Island to count as many different species as possible. This year there was a myriad of species found within Freshkills Park and across the Island.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered at Freshkills Park in 2017! This year, nearly 200 volunteers contributed over 500 hours of community service with Freshkills Park. These activities ranged from removing invasive plants during neighborhood park cleanups to assisting visitors at Discovery Day events.