Freshkills Park Blog

A quiet and handsome set of photographs by Nathan Kensinger showcases the decommissioned Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.  The station was closed along with the Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001 and is currently unoccupied.  Its rehabilitation has recently been put out to bid to private waste management companies for use in barge export of waste, in accordance with the city’s 2006 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan. 

A number of new technology-based parks applications have come online recently: Park Scan allows San Francisco park visitors to report maintenance issues to relevant city officials and to track prior reports; Off Leash is an iPhone app that directs users to the nearest off-leash dog park; The Hidden Park, also for the iPhone, leads kids through site-wide scavenger hunts of ten major world parks, including Central Park. 

People Make Parks is a joint effort of Partnerships for Parks and the Hester Street Collaborative that aims to involve ordinary citizens in the design of public parks.  The project helps citizens compile local knowledge to develop a vision for a park, educates them about the capital development process for building or renovating a park and helps connect them and their vision to the Department of Parks & Recreation at opportune moments in that process. 

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Ken Burns’ most recent documentary series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, will air on PBS in September.  Burns on National Parks:

You’d be hard pressed to find something that was a purer expression of the democratic impulse, in setting aside land, not for the privileged, not for the kings and nobility, but for everybody.

We recently discovered that our neighbors at the New Jersey Meadowlands keep a nature blog full of amazing photos of the bird and insect life that lives within its 8,400 acres of wetlands and open space.  Lots of these photos have been taken at the 110-acre Richard W.

There are a handful of skate parks built from recycled materials these days, but generally, these massive concrete installations have been as environmentally friendly as golf courses.  The Ed Benedict Skate Park in Portland, Oregon is trying to revise that image by managing storm water run-off more responsibly, absorbing it through integrated ‘biofiltration islands’ that have been incorporated as design elements.

An event this Saturday on Staten Island invites artists to bring leftover ideas and pieces of work to an afternoon of collaborative dada production.  Day de Dada is August 1st from 1:00 to 4:00 on Van Duzer Street between Wright and Beach Streets, Staten Island. 

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

Open and on view for one more week at The Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens is The University of Trash, an installation by artists Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman that functions as the backdrop for a host of lectures, workshops and events. 

Two recent efforts at sharing private green space: Hyperlocavore is an online ‘yardsharing’ forum that facilitates sharing of residential yard space, skills and resources for the collaborative tending of gardens and urban farms;  Community Supported Forestry is Roald Gunderson and Amelia Baxter’s attempt to build a member base for their 140-acre Vermont forest; membership is $550 for a year’s worth of unlimited recreational access, select access to forest harvests like wild mushrooms and sustainable lumber, and member workshops on topics like beer brewing, beekeeping and natural architecture.

The Bronx River Art Center‘s new exhibit features work by Staten Island-based artist Tattfoo Tan and Bronx-based artist Abigail DeVille.  The show is called Black Gold, a term that’s often used to describe compost, and the work–painting, sculpture, installation–circles around issues concerning the natural environment. 

We really enjoyed last Friday’s tour of the green roof atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Technical Services Complex.  The roof is gorgeous and inspiring, and it’s worth checking out our flickr photos (and videos) of the tour if you weren’t able to make it. 

Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have just launched Trash Track, a project that attaches tags to various pieces of garbage to electronically track their real-time movement through the city.  The goal is to “reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today’s recycling and sanitation systems.” 

Starting January 1, Washington D.C. will be taxing shoppers 5 cents for every disposable paper or plastic bag in an effort to encourage bag reuse.  The tax revenue will go toward cleaning up the District’s Anacostia River.  The move follows San Francisco’s full-on ban of plastic shopping bags and L.A.’s

This Saturday is the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance’s City of Water Day, a festival celebrating the potential of the City’s waterfront.  There will be plenty of free entertainment, education and activities, including boat tours, local bands, award-winning food vendors and lots of special children’s events.

Metropolis Magazine‘s 2009 Next Generation design competition asked entrants to “fix our energy addiction” at any scale and through any design specialty.  From 197 ent­ries, the winner was a proposal to integrate wind turbines into existing power transmission towers. 

Anne Schwartz’s recent column in the Gotham Gazette lays out some pretty impressive figures identifying city parks as economic assets: Central Park contributed $1 billion to the city’s economy in 2007; the High Line is expected to generate $4 billion in private investment and $900 million in revenues to the city over the next 30 years; the 2008 completion of the Greenwich Village section of the Hudson River Park raised real estate prices in the adjacent two blocks by 20 percent. 

The Obama Administration is reportedly considering a program called “Shrink to Survive,” which would selectively bulldoze blocks of abandoned real estate in 50 economically depressed US cities and replace them with parks, forest and meadows. The plan is based on a downsizing scheme in Flint, Michigan–once the home of General Motors–where citizens are already advocating the use of vacant lots as community gardens. 

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We’ve been linking to Colin Beaven’s No Impact Man blog for a while now.  The No Impact project, and others like it, are appealing to us because they’re at least partly about assuaging the massive environmental guilt (or owning up to the responsibility, if you slice it that way) that comes with fuller understanding of our effect on the world around us. 

For our Freshkills Park Talk two weeks back, Dr. Steven Handel shared insights into the emerging field of urban restoration ecology, which focuses on the challenge of bringing ecological diversity back to degraded lands like brownfields and landfills.  He discussed his research at the Freshkills Park site and others in the region and went on to describe how his expertise has informed the design of Orange County, CA’s Great Park.