Freshkills Park Blog

At last year’s Sneak Peak we were lucky enough to get Mierle Laderman Ukeles‘ iconic mirrored garbage truck, ‘The Social Mirror’ to feature prominently as a preview of public art to come in the future park.  This year, we’re able to deliver a little bit more of that future with a total of 15 art installations throughout the event site, curated with the assistance of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI). 

Over the course of the various stages of its history, a wide range of professionals have spent time working on or thinking about the Freshkills Park site: sanitation workers, engineers, equipment manufacturers, scientists, policymakers, architects, designers, artists, philanthropists. There are countless layers of expertise to mine in understanding the site. 

Once you work up an appetite kayaking, biking and touring the site at Sneak Peak, make sure to stop by the food vendors for an assortment of tasty grub.  We will have the Vendy Award-winning King of Falafel and Shawarma, Carmelo’s Brick Oven Pizza, and Killmeyer’s Old Bavaria Inn serving up savory fare as well as The Treats Truck, Staten Island Iceman, and Nonie Chu’s Pastries with sweet treats.

There will be plenty of activities and fun and gorgeous scenery at Sneak Peak this Sunday, but it’s important to remember that the Freshkills Park site is a landfill because of us–all of us, and our constant production of garbage.  And it’s important to take this site as an example to act more responsibly. 

The most in-demand activity at last year’s Sneak Peak, by far, was the chance to paddle a canoe around the Freshkills Park site.  This year we began a public kayak tour program at the site and will open up our capacity significantly at this year’s Sneak Peak, this Sunday, October 2nd.

We’re excited to introduce a new way of engaging with the Freshkills Park site: Freshkills Park+, an augmented-reality guide to the site’s many facilities, vistas, natural and manmade features.  The experience, which is available to users of iPhone 4, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices, was constructed using the Layar browser, which makes use of a phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to enhance what is seen with a layer of digital information. 

Last year’s Sneak Peak at Freshkills Park was such a huge success that we decided to make it an annual event as we continue to develop the park site.  This year, we have expanded the scope and the offerings of what you will be able to do and see at Sneak Peak.

The Council for the Arts and Humanities on Staten Island (COAHSI) runs an interview with artist DB Lampman on their blog, inSIde. Lampman discusses her piece “I am Within/I am Without,” which she will be performing at the Freshkills Park site this Saturday, September 17th.

In June,  the NYC Department of City Planning and the NYC Economic Development Corporation released Working West Shore 2030, a land use and transportation planning report that provides recommendations for decision-making along the west shore of Staten Island to developers, property owners, civic stakeholders and elected officials.

Amid all the talk about green roofs, it’s easy to forget about white roofs, also called cool roofs.  Cities are full of heat-trapping black surfaces, including roofs as well as roads, that intensify the urban heat island effect, raising temperatures up to 22°F warmer than in neighboring suburbs. 

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation‘s Daily Plant runs an interview with Richie Cabo, Director of the Citywide Nursery and designer of the O2 Composter, a new compost bin that could increase efficiency of leaf management operations in parks throughout the city. 

The 7.5 MW Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm was the first wind power facility built in New Jersey and the first urban coastal wind farm in the United States.  It is located within the Atlantic County Utilities Authority (ACUA) Wastewater Treatment Facility site and has been in operation since December 2005.

Another gem from the archives: an article in the Saturday Evening Post from 1938 written by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses extolling the then-in-process transformation of the City’s Corona ash dump into the stately Flushing Meadows Park.  We’re reminded of how much the outline of the story prefigures Freshkills Park, where Moses, himself, was the catalyst for landfilling operations, with the endgame of constructing housing, parkland and industrial space.

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection has announced a $400 million upgrade to the 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) in Brooklyn that will reduce the amount of untreated sewage overflow entering Jamaica Bay  during storm events by 1.2 billion gallons a year.

Nuit Blanche New York’s (NBNY) 2011 Bring to Light festival will fill Greenpoint, Brooklyn with light, video, sound and sculpture-based installations “exploring innovative approaches to temporary public art that transform landscapes, re-imagine public space and foster civic dialogue.” The one-night festival will run concurrently with similar events in Paris, Brussels and Toronto on October 1st, as part of sponsor NBNY’s global event network. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXABlDk4cYU&w=507&h=370]

A clip from 2008 History Channel program “The Works” features Staten Island’s Pratt Industries, where more than half of New York City’s paper is recycled.  This is a terrific clip that explains the infrastructure required for paper collection and processing as well as spelling out the steps of paper recycling. 

Sunday’s two public kayak tours were a rousing success.  Following up on the highly in-demand free paddle in Fresh Kills Creek during last October’s Sneak Peak, these were the first public boating tours we’ve held at the Freshkills Park site. 

The new year-round East River Ferry Service, provided by NY Waterway, offers passage between 11 stops in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Governor’s Island along the East River.  The scenic commuter service, now only a few weeks old, hatched from a City initiative to create more viable, private mass transit alternatives for the City’s growing waterfront populations, especially those underserved by bus and subway capacity.

Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former civilian and military airport on the Jamaica Bay coast, is now poised to become New York City’s largest campground. The site was taken over by the National Park Service (NPS) in 1971 after being decommissioned for aircraft, and as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area has since played host to a variety of activities: organized sports, model and full-scale airplane hobbyism, motorcycle practice and Brooklyn’s largest community garden. 

Last month, the City of Philadelphia celebrated the opening of Race Street Pier, a new waterfront public space designed by landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations, who are also the designers of Freshkills Park and the High Line.