Freshkills Park Blog

Ballistic Architecture Machine’s (BAM) concept for a green roof installation, called Biornis Aesthetope, is an aviary for migrating birds proposed for the 70,000 sq ft rooftop of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.  Ornithologists at Harvard and Cornell Universities provided BAM guidance on the resting and nutritional needs for 12 species of birds, including diurnal raptors, songbirds and owls, whose migration paths along the Atlantic Coast Flyway bring them through New York City regularly.

With the opening of the West Harlem Piers Park at the end of May, the Hudson-flanking edge of Manhattan became an unbroken strip of public park space.  Designed by W and Archipelago (with initial support, like Freshkills Park, from the New York Department of State Office of Coastal, Local Government & Community Sustainability under Title 11 of the Environmental Protection Fund) the completed West Harlem Piers Park represents a decade of engagement among various community groups and individuals. 

The upcoming week is a busy one for us.  Three terrific public events focused on different aspects of the Freshkills Park site: waste, art and ecology.  They’re all free, and we hope to see you at one or more of them. 

The Hugo Neu Metals Recycling Facility, in the Hunt’s Point area of the Bronx, is getting a stormwater management makeover. The Gaia Institute’s new system for the 6.5-acre facility recycles stormwater that would otherwise run off into the Bronx River Estuary.

Andy Lubershane’s weekly series Earthly Comics works to unpack environmental topics that can be difficult to understand: walkability; pervious concrete; cellulosic ethanol.  Not the stuff of Marmaduke, but it does break some complicated ideas down into digestible chunks, and it’s pretty lighthearted.

Free Bike Fridays continue at Governors Island this summer.  Friday visitors can borrow a free bike from Bike and Roll for up to an hour (beyond that timespan, we’re talking rentals); you can also bring your own bike.  The entire two-mile waterfront promenade of the island is open, contributing to a total of five miles of car-free cycling.

Photographer Willie Chu took some gorgeous images of the Freshkills Park site during our incredibly foggy, early morning photographers tour in early May.  We hope we can exhibit these eventually.  We’d like to do another photographers tour in the late summer or early fall–if you’re a professional photographer who would like to participate, please let us know.

The Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Science recently released a report finding that polluted and damaged ecosystems have the potential to recover within a lifetime (average of 46 years), or even as little as a decade. Researchers studied 240 sites affected by both natural and human-induced disturbances and concluded that, with adequate restoration and cleanup work, even a heavily polluted ecosystem can revitalize itself.

The New York City Department of Transportation has created a free Google map of the locations of almost all (over 6,000) of the outdoor bike racks in New York City, and some indoor and covered racks. 

On Staten Island, the bulk of these are along the Bay St/Richmond Rd and Victory Blvd/Richmond Ave corridors, the latter of which will eventually lead you into Freshkills Park. 

The first section, anyway–running between Gansevoort Street and West 20th Street.  Design of the formerly-abandoned-elevated-rail-line-turned-chic-urban-park was led by Field Operations, the landscape architecture and urban design firm that’s also designing Freshkills Park.

Lots of photos and coverage of the High Line’s opening in the New York Times, Curbed, Gothamist, DesignNotes and the High Line blog.

The 30-acre Bethlehem Steel Mill on Lake Erie was in operation for almost 80 years and was closed in the mid-1970s.  Contaminated with steel slag and industrial waste, the site was idle for 30 years.  In May 2002, the EPA awarded the City of Lackawanna a $200,000 grant to investigate the site’s potential for reuse. 

Integrating solar and wind power capture into natural and urban environments isn’t just a technical or engineering task–it’s also a design opportunity.  Some recent eye-popping ideas have ranged from a dragonfly-shaped urban farm on Roosevelt Island to a snakeskin-like PV-tiled stadium in Taiwan.

We get a lot of raised eyebrows when we first talk about the Freshkills Park Project with the uninitiated.  Some folks are put off by the idea of landfills in general, and some are familiar with the stigma the site has given Staten Island over the past half century.

[vimeo vimeo.com/4854719]

The newest episode of PBS Thirteen’s online video series The City Concealed features Freshkills Park.  Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh gives a guided tour of the site and its history, punctuating the scenic drive with a look around the landscape of the future South Park and a view into the Department of Sanitation’s waste byproduct treatment facilities.

The Hiriya landfill in Tel Aviv, a 2,000-acre site adjacent to the city’s airport, has a lot in common with the Freshkills Park site.  From 1952 to 1999, the landfill was Israel’s largest garbage disposal site, at one point receiving one third of the country’s waste. 

For the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival at Manahatta Island, the Wildlife Conservation Society and ecologist Eric W. Sanderson have prepared the Manahatta Project, a massive GIS-based portrait of the topography and ecology of Manhattan as it was in 1609.

Our big thanks to Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from Field Operations for last Thursday’s Freshkills Park Talk on designing the park. Jerome delivered a great primer on landscape architecture (including a history in two slides!) and talked about the mandate for new model of practice given the nature of the site and the enormity of the project, both in space and time scale.

[vimeo vimeo.com/4951004]

Last week, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) hosted a panel called Urban Parks in the Twenty-First Century: Creating a New Model.  Park designers, administrators and other experts discussed the some of New York City’s most innovative new park projects: Concrete Plant Park  in the South Bronx, Riverside South on the Upper West Side, and, of course, Freshkills Park.  

Yesterday we were treated to a tour of the Staten Island Transfer Station (SITS) by Tom Killeen, the Department of Sanitation’s Director of Fresh Kills.  SITS is a 79,000 sq ft complex opened in 2006 and is responsible for the processing ALL of Staten Island’s residential waste. 

This week Mayor Bloomberg signed legislation to establish a comprehensive wetlands strategy by for New York City by 2012. The Mayor emphasized at a public hearing on Tuesday that protecting wetlands (of which there are many at the Freshkills Park site) is a high priority of PlaNYC 2030.