Freshkills Park Blog

Staten Island-based artist DP Lampman has been selected to create an art installation as part of the NYCEDC New Stapleton Waterfront project.

In 2011, Lampman unveiled Freshkills Park’s first temporary on-site art installation, I Am Within/I Am Without. Three large-scale human figurative sculptures atop one of the hills at Freshkills Park reached out with multiple limbs towards the sky, then gently curved back towards the Earth.

The park will receive $30 million in funding for major capital advancements.

On August 18, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito, and NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver announced that the City will invest $150 million in major improvements at five large parks under the new Anchor Parks initiative.

Written by Savannah Lust, Freshkills Park Development Intern.

Bok choy and mint are ripe for the picking aboard Swale, Mary Mattingly’s floating food forest project that is docked at Yankee Pier on Governor’s Island until September 15th.

Mary Mattingly is a New York City based visual artist who proclaims in her Manifesto that “art and utopian thought” are capable of cultivating “systematic social change.”

Written by Jessa Orluk, Seasonal Programming Associate

One sunny Sunday morning, my co-worker and I led a guided nature hike at Freshkills Park. We met at Schmul Park, an open section of the Freshkills Park project. As we waited for others to join us, we watched kids climbing up and down the slide and their parents sit in the shade.

Written by Susannah Aziz.

Many New Yorkers benefit from the great parks and preserved nature settings throughout NYC for recreation. After spending several years at home raising my young children and relying heavily on so many of the beautiful parks to entertain them, I realized how truly valuable they are.

Ask people to name an animal that lives in New York City, and chances are they’ll pick one of the following: Rats, pigeons, or cockroaches.

And they’ll probably have some horror stories to tell about them.

Now, we could go on and on here at the Freshkills Park office about how there are thousands of different animal species living within the boundaries of NYC, including many that are rare, but today we’d like to take a minute to highlight some aspects of those lesser-loved, often only known for their traits that are in conflict with human society, animals that call NYC home.

In 2015, sophomores from CUNY Macaulay Honors College worked with professional scientists across 233 acres and two days in August to conduct a BioBlitz at Freshkills 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.

Freshkills Park remains closed to the public for most of the year while the project is under development. NYC Parks and the Freshkills Park Alliance work hard to offer as many ways to experience the Park as possible during this time, but we know nothing is quite like being inside the gates witnessing the landfill-to-park transformation firsthand.

Several times a year, the AIANY & Freshkills Park planners host a special Classic Harbor Line tour into the Freshkills waterways.  It’s a fascinating tour, full of otherwise inaccessible views and a window into New York City’s historical and current development on the water.

After 11 months at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, NEST was de-installed on August 9th. A collaborative collection of habitats found in Freshkills Park, Kirk Finkel’s NEST represents an intersection between the diverse bird population of Staten Island and the dynamic urban environment that surrounds it.

“Freshkills Park: Landscape in Motion” will open to the public this September. Installed at the Staten Island Arts Culture Lounge in the St. George Ferry Terminal, “Landscape in Motion” will be the exhibition capstone to a landscape photography competition organized by Freshkills Park with the Staten Island Advance.

Josephine Hill-James is an Environmental Monitoring Intern this summer. She is working on a project analyzing the soil in a forested area of Freshkills Park to examine how the health of the soil can demonstrate the resilience of the park’s ecosystems.

This week, the Staten Island Advance announced the winners of “A Fresh Look,” the contest that invited people to submit their landscape photographs of Freshkills Park at the professional, amateur, and student level. Congratulations to all the honorees!

The new NYC Parks Public Art Map & Guide makes it easy to find the vast collection of monuments and temporary public art located throughout the city’s parks. Existing outside the closed environment of a museum, public artwork is not separated from the everyday.

Jocelyn Zorn is an environmental science student at Sarah Lawrence College, and will be spending her final semester as an undergraduate studying tropical biology in Costa Rica this fall. She is working on monitoring the ongoing environmental restoration of Freshkills Park this summer.

Where does a park end and a neighborhood begin? For many parks in New York City, the line has been pretty rigid. Tall gates and fences have separated a number of the city’s parks and playgrounds from adjoining sidewalks, creating literal and symbolic divides between people and green spaces.

Savannah Lust is a recent graduate of Purchase College, SUNY, where she double majored in Philosophy and Art History. She sees Freshkills Park as an exciting place to begin questioning our complex relationship to the environment, a question she’s interested in approaching through art and design.

Enjoy Freshkills Park’s unique experience and spectacular views at the last Discovery Day of the year. During this free event, 700 acres and eight miles of trails in the normally closed site will be open, with opportunities to explore and learn about the landfill-to-park project.

How do we share a space? Further, how does a subjective relation to place and a relation to others map onto one another? The places in question here are urban, public spaces and exist, whether as an active choosing or unconsciously, in relation to another’s experience of a space.

For the past year, students at the Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn took a deep dive into New York City’s trash. The partnership was part of the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Urban Investigations program. Students research pertinent issues in their community then, with the help of a Teaching Artist, learn how to share their information in a meaningful way.