Freshkills Park Blog

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.

Visiting landmarks is a beloved pastime for many in the pursuit of sights, photographs and wonder. But what constitutes a landmark? The National Park Service defines National Historic Landmarks (NHL) as nationally significant historic places designated as exceptional by the Secretary of the Interior “because of their abilities to illustrate U.S.

Freshkills Park will offer a Discovery Day on Sunday September 30. This free event is a chance to explore normally closed areas of the park and experience the landscape and views the landfill-to-park project has to offer. Hundreds of acres and and miles of trails will be open for a day of bicycling, tours, and activities for all ages.

This summer, Freshkills Park offered creative workshops about plants at the Greenbelt Nature Center. Using art as a platform, these workshops engaged families and individuals in learning about the relationships between native plants, invasive plants, pollinators, and food plants. The series of two pigment workshops and two plantable paper workshops were open to participants of all ages.

Freshkills Park: Field R/D is a project to develop a visionary, community-responsive residency program for the former NYC landfill. Since April 2017, Field R/D artists have been working on site in flexible, collaborative engagements with the landscape. In January 2018, the project was named one of sixty awardees of the Rubin Foundation’s grants toward their Art and Social Justice Initiative.

This summer, NYC Parks staff launched a biological filtering dock, or “living” dock, at Freshkills Park. This dock will help clean the water within the site’s network of tidal creeks using native plants and shellfish. The dock will also increase biodiversity, which makes the park’s tidal wetland ecosystem more resilient in the face of climate change and storm events.

A new research project is being developed at Freshkills, and it’s a noisy one. Staff and interns will partner with members of the NYC Parks Wildlife Unit to place sound meters around the park to compare ambient noise levels between two areas.

The four-day Reclaimed Lands Conference brought together researchers, practitioners, planners, ecologists, artists, designers, community groups, and students to bridge the gaps between disciplines and productively explore the issues and initiatives surrounding these post-industrial reclaimed landscapes. With field trips and panels at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch, participants discussed topics like monitoring changes in biodiversity, designing ecologically sustainable re-development, engaging residents in stewardship, and transforming public perceptions.

Compelled by alternative functions, artist Bill Jenkins’ practice reconstitutes utilitarian objects and places. In the exhibition Image/Conduit, currently on view at the Freshkills Park Studio + Gallery, he investigates this curiosity through the topography of Freshkills Park.

The exhibition features video work titled Scans, investigating the relationship between decades of compressed garbage placed at Fresh Kills with the picturesque grassy hills that compose the landscape of Freshkills Park.

Work by several artists will be installed and realized at Freshkills Park this summer as part of the art-research project Field R/D. This phase of the expansive and collaborative project is made possible thanks to a Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Initiative grant award.

Late summer and early fall are great times to visit Freshkills Park! As the park is built in phases, tours and events offer opportunities to explore sections of the site before they open. Whether kayaking the creeks, photographing the landscape, or hiking and bicycling along miles of meadows, these programs invite visitors to experience and learn about the landfill-to-park project.