Freshkills Park Blog

Freshkills Park has already seen a vigorous return of wildlife. White-tailed deer roam the grasslands, turtles nest in the salt marsh, osprey swoop over Main Creek, and muskrats leave tracks through the wetland. Now Freshkills Park can add another species to the list: bald eagle.

On Friday October 24, 2014 New York City Department of Parks and Recreation launched the Capital Project Tracker, an interactive map of all active Parks Department projects. There currently are over 400 active projects on the Tracker, with a timeline of each project and dedicated sections including Design, Procurement, and Construction phases.

Landscape Architect Andrew Deer captured the autumnal foliage beautifully on a recent site visit to the New Springville Greenway, currently under construction. In his words, this bucolic setting transports one to a place far beyond a dozen feet from the busy Richmond Avenue once it opens for use by pedestrians and cyclists.

From commercially sailing NYC waterways to conducting doctoral research on South American weakly fish, Cait Field brings experience as a scientist, mariner and educator to her new job as the Freshkills Park Research Program Manager. Cait is currently completing a PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior at CUNY Graduate Center.

The Department of Education and the Department of Sanitation jointly run the “Organics Collection Program,” which diverts organic materials such as food scraps, soiled paper, yard waste out of the landfill stream and into regional collection centers and the Anaerobic Digest-er Eggs, which extract methane from decomposing organic matter into energy.

There is no more exciting time to join a new working environment than when a huge event such as Freshkills Park’s annual Sneak ‘Peak’ is around the corner!

Eva Neves and myself, Rachel Boeglin, are members of this year’s Conservation Corps with the New York City Parks Department.

You may have read our recent blog post about the herd of goats that were used in Freshkills Park to clear the invasive reed Phragmites, but did you know that goats were once a common fixture in New York City?

Last week, a New York Times article featured the work of one man, Eymund Diegel, and his hydrology studies of the Gowanus Canal. One of the tools he employed was aerial mapping using a helium-inflated balloon with a handheld camera attached.

Summer 2014 has been quite moderate compared to other humid, sweat-drenched days of summer past. However, this relatively mild summer may just be an outlier. According to Climate-Central, not-for-profit climate research think tank, urban areas have increased their summertime temperatures an average of 2f during the day and 4f overnight.

At Freshkills Park, conquering rapid growing invasive plants is no simple task. For a human it may be daunting manual labor, but for goats and sheep, it’s just lunchtime. Two years ago, Freshkills Park enlisted the assistance of goats with large appetites to clear a portion of phragmites on site.

With a population of nearly 5.4 million people on less than 300 square miles of land, Singapore is the third densest country in the world. Once a part of Malaysia, it became an independent nation in 1965, and by doing so, the new island city-state began to increasingly rely on importing food to feed its people.

During a clear and comfortable late July morning, the staff of Freshkills Park was given a behind-the-scenes tour of one of Manhattan’s most popular destinations: The High Line. With Vice President of Park Operations Martin Nembhard and Director of Horticulture Tom Smarr as our guides, we were treated with a glimpse into their new office building as well as a detailed accounting of their landscape design and management strategies.

One hundred years ago, forested swamps and tidal wetlands characterized the site that is now becoming Freshkills Park. In 1947 Robert Moses changed all that by designating the spot to be used as a landfill. The original plan of three years of garbage tipping followed by urban development turned into something far more complex, resulting in Fresh Kills gaining the infamous title of world’s largest landfill.

The Freshkills Park Team endeavors to keep up with innovative programming and research on NYC Waterways and recently took a ferry to Governor’s Island to visit the Harbor School, home of the Billion Oyster Project. The Harbor School provides a truly unique maritime program for high school students with a curriculum built around restoring one billion oysters to New York Harbor. 

Think about bugs; now think about billions of insects concentrated in one facility. Some might get queasy at this thought; however, that is exactly what is happening at a new 90,000 square foot facility near South Africa’s Capetown. Typical production of protein requires a great deal of water, land and capital.

Allaboutbirds is our go-to online resource for bird identification and they’ve enhanced it with this great interactive feature!

Bicycling is not only a healthy recreational activity; it is a growing means of environmentally friendly transportation, especially in large and congested cities like New York. The New Springville Greenway at Freshkills Park, now under construction, is a project that supports bicycling as a hobby and as a viable way to get to work and school.

Many cities in the American Midwest and Northeast have seen a drastic decline in population over the past fifty years due to deindustrialization and the flight of jobs away from cities. This has left cities stuck with the bill of maintaining abandoned property, which is compounded by a smaller tax base in both property and sales to collect revenue for municipal financing.

At more than 20 million people, metro Manila is the one of the densest places on earth with an average of 37,000 people per square mile. Quezon City sits within this sprawling megalopolis and is home to the Payatas Landfill, one of 13 sites that take in the area’s 11,000 tons of waste per day.

Garbage is big business in the Big Apple—nearly 2 billion dollars worth of the city’s budget goes to the Department of Sanitation (DOS); and of that: $300 million is spent just disposing of it elsewhere. Last year this amounted to a cost of $95 per ton, up 28% since 2004, far outpacing inflation.