Freshkills Park Blog

The first issue of LANDFILL, a new annual publication, features photos of first-person narratives being buried at locations around the five boroughs of New York.  Like PostSecret, but uplifting and signed, and with a physical component in the natural landscape.

To celebrate National Poetry Month this April, we’re inviting folks to share ideas, impressions, experiences, and thoughts of Freshkills Park – in Haiku form.  A Haiku is a type of poem written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, for a total of 17 syllables:

Soft fields green expanse
Undulating horizon
Gleaming rivers meet

Prizes will be awarded to the top three winners. 

The MoMA is kicking off  a new exhibit today, “In Situ: Architecture and Landscape,” an exploration of the relationship between the built environment and its surrounding landscape.  Exhibited 20th century works of architecture and landscape will highlight  “spatial, social, and environmental aspects of human life and how they had profound reverberations in both architecture and landscape design.” 

Did we mention that we are trying to develop a research and development agenda for Freshkills Park?  Park development over the next several years will only be able to open up about 100 acres of the 2,200-acre site to the public.

Interdisciplinary environmental arts organization Ecoartspace has opened a physical space in Soho.  Current featured exhibit is “habitat”, an artist studio shed built of reclaimed materials.  The space will also host discussions, screenings, panels, readings and performances centering around art that concerns itself with environmental issues.

Two years into Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 initiative, the Sustainability Practice Network is hosting a panel at NYU the evening of April 21st to discuss the status of PlaNYC initiatives and review lessons learned.

Launched on Earth Day, 2007 Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 promised to address the major environmental sustainability issues facing the city, with 127 initiatives on housing, open space, water, air quality, transportation, brownfields, and the city’s impact on climate change.

Electronic waste contains some pretty dangerous stuff and is best kept out of landfills.  Starting in 2010, disposal of electronics with your regular trash will be illegal in New York City, and any resident who throws electronics into their trash will be charged a $100 fine. 

Nearly a third of the nation’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline due to habitat loss, invasive species and other threats, according to a recent report from the Department of Interior.  Birds have been getting a bad rep recently, particularly because of the role of Canada geese in the Flight 1549 incident. 

While we’re on the subject of alternative power plants: WebEcoist has posted a rundown of 15 cutting-edge biofuels.  Pretty exciting stuff.  As mentioned before, the Freshkills Park site already harvests natural gas from decomposing waste, but we’re interested in developing the site’s capacity to generate energy from other biomass, too. 

A recently announced 200 million euro project in Venice, Italy will harvest algae from seaweed in the city’s canals for use in creating emissions-free energy.  Laboratory-based algae power plants will produce 40 megawatts of electricity–half the energy required by Venice’s city center.

This awesome 200-hectare public park in Duisburg Nord, Germany was transformed from a coal-fired steel production plant into a giant industrial playground. Latz + Partner’s design emphasized the value of memory: the goal was to create a space former mill workers could explore with their grandchildren and still be able to identify the form and function of the old machinery. 

Thanks to everyone who came out to last Thursday’s talk on the history of operations at Fresh Kills.  Dennis Diggins’ fascinating and wide-ranging overview touched on the history of sanitary landfills and the city’s solid waste management system, the evolution of equipment used for transporting, compacting and containing waste, Dennis’ own personal anecdotes about working at Fresh Kills from 1991-2006 (including the sage advice: “Don’t walk with your hands in your pockets in a landfill,” because if you trip and fall your hands are the only things keeping you from falling head first into the trash) and the Department of Sanitation’s tremendous role in the clean-up and investigation of the World Trade Center attack in the days and months following 9/11.

A series of wowzers: the largest green roof in the US!  Which doubles as a driving range!  And sits atop a water treatment facility!  The $2.1 billion dollar Croton Water Filtration Plant in the Bronx was designed by  Grimshaw Architects, landscape architect Ken Smith and green roof gurus Rana Creek. 

If you want to learn more about solar energy and its implementation, I Heart PV, a pro-solar campaign launched out of Solar One Green Energy, Arts & Education Center, will be giving a special presentation at The Park Slope Food Coop tomorrow  on Photovoltaic technology (“PV”) and current attempts to establish New York as a leader in solar adoption.

Just found this on Where: a critical response to the Freshkills Park plan prompted by last November’s New York Magazine feature.  The thrust of the critique is that the Field Operations’ design of Freshkills Park will create a landscape that can be falsely “consumed without guilt:”

All the capping and veiling and the sealing tight are carried out not only to elude dealing with material run-off of the waste, but also to distract from what that waste means and implies and reflects (the architects and the city want to avoid any leaks, physical or moral).

Forty years have passed since Mierle Ukeles wrote her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!, which launched her trajectory as the premier maintenance artist in the world and ultimately led to her selection as the Percent for Art artist selected to contributed to the Freshkills Park master plan. 

The spring conference of the Forum for Urban Design is called The 21^st Century Park & the Contemporary City.  The first evening’s panel is free, and there will be some big name landscape architects on it: Ken Greenberg, George Hargreaves, Michael Van Valkenburgh and James Corner, principal of Field Operations, who are designing Freshkills Park as well as the High Line. 

On-air on NY1 right now: an interview and tour with Freshkills Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh about two sections of the park that will be open within the next year-and-a-half: the Owl Hollow Soccer Fields and Schmul Park.  You can watch the clip online or on TV, airing all day on NY1.

FIGMENT, the arts organization partnered with the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC), is building a mini-golf course on Governor’s Island.  And they’re holding  a design competition for single holes, which you can enter.  Governor’s Island is an interesting project and, with FIGMENT, GIPEC has been able to keep the island enviably well programmed. 

Urban Omnibus has posted a terrific project portrait and interview video with artist George Trakas about his Newtown Creek Nature Walk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  As a Percent for Art artist, Trakas piggybacked on the Department of Environmental Protection‘s $3 billion upgrade of the wastewater treatment facility to create a handsomely designed waterfront park/plaza where employees and locals can relax.