Tags: events

This Wednesday evening, the Staten Island Greenbelt Nature Center hosts its annual meeting, coupled with a book launch for the recently released High Rock and the Greenbelt: The Making of New York City’s Largest Park.  The book chronicles the history of the Greenbelt’s formation.

This Saturday, members of the community dialogue and performance project Staten Island OutLOUD, will be reading from the writings of Sandra Cisneros at Freshkills Park. Cisneros is a leading American writer, whose works highlight the urban, Latina-American experience. Excerpts from works including The House on Mango Street will be read in English and Spanish from the top of North Mound, against spectacular views of Staten Island and the Manhattan skyline.

About 2,000 people joined us for the second annual Sneak Peak at Freshkills Park on Sunday, soaking up the incredible fall weather and taking part in the many, many activities we had to offer: making and flying kites, kayaking in the creeks (our registration records show 317 kayakers over the course of the day), walking the site with an expert, riding ponies, petting goats, making bags and birdhouses, learning about recycling and energy efficiency, enjoying the fun music, cool crafts and tasty food and generally celebrating the potential of this fascinating and amazing site.

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). 

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. 

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. 

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 Freshkills Park development team at the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation is in the process of designing a 3.2-mile off-road bicycle and pedestrian path running north-south along the eastern edge of the future Freshkills Park site.  We are hosting an open house tomorrow, Saturday May 14th, to talk about the project and to answer questions about it. 

Yesterday, March 22nd, 2011, marked the ten year anniversary of the last barge of garbage delivered to the Fresh Kills Landfill.  To mark the occasion and to celebrate ten years of reclamation and preparation for park development, the NYC Department of Sanitation and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation jointly hosted a small celebration at the Freshkills Park site.

The Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance will be holding its third annual symposium next weekend, to survey and discuss interdisciplinary work at the intersection of dance and ecology.  “Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance and Ecology” will include presentations from past participants in iLAND’s residencies, general discussion panels and hands-on workshops in the field. 

Our thanks to Michael Marrella and the crowd who attended his lecture last week at the Metropolitan Exchange as part of our  Freshkills Park Talks series.  After starting with a brief history of the New York City’s harbors and waterways, Michael walked the audience through the process of preparing Vision 2020, the update to New York City’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues in Downtown Brooklyn tomorrow, Tuesday, February 15th, with Michael Marrella, Project Director of the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan for the New York City Department of City Planning.

Michael will be discussing Vision 2020, an update to the New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan that sets the new long-range vision for the City’s waterfront and waterways. 

Thanks to the huge crowd that came out to Robin Nagle’s talk in our lecture series two weeks back.  Standing in front of a fascinating slideshow featuring many of the men and women who keep New York City clean (or–more than that–keep New York City alive, as artist Mierle Ukeles famously phrased it), Robin discussed her academic approach to Sanitation, the stigma we attach to the work San Men and Women do and some hypotheses as to how those stigmas develop and why they stick. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues on Wednesday, December 8th, with a talk by Dr. Robin Nagle.  Titled “The Twist-Tie that Binds: Garbage, New York City and You,” the lecture will recount how the City’s garbage connects New Yorkers to one another as well as to history, politics, infrastructure, and technology.

This weekend, Anthology Film Archives presents Site Recordings: Land Art on Film and Video, a series devoted to films by and about artists associated with the Land Art/Earthworks movement.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, modernism’s affirmation of fixity, permanence, and autonomy lost its hold on the Western imagination, shaping the manner in which a whole host of artists engaged with the moving image.

After a late summer hiatus, our Freshkills Park Talks lecture series resumes next Monday with a talk by Dr. Steven Handel, Director of the Center for Urban Restoration Ecology (CURE) at Rutgers University.  CURE’s research and practice focuses on ‘ecological services’ provided by patches of native habitat in urban and other degraded areas, and how to ensure the sustainability of those services with relatively low maintenance costs.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe broke ground on the second project in the development of Freshkills Park, the $6.5 million renovation of Schmul Park.  (The 28-acre Owl Hollow Fields were the first project.)  An 8-acre park in the Travis neighborhood, Schmul Park will serve as a community gateway into the larger Freshkills Park.