Tags: Freshkills Park

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. 

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.

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. 

It is time to announce the winners of our third annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest! April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we asked fans of Freshkills Park to submit a haiku inspired by the park.  We split the entries into two categories, Adult and Student, and our judges selected three Adult winners and one Student winner.

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues as we celebrate the launch of the Oral History Projects in honor of Freshkills Park and the New York City Department of Sanitation, Monday, May 9th, at New York University.

For the past five months, a team of historians focusing on the New York City Department of Sanitation and on Freshkills Park have interviewed citizens, engineers, government officials and Sanitation workers about the labors of waste and about New York City’s most ambitious park project in 150 years.

A new exhibition on the human relationship with hygiene opened last week at the Wellcome Collection in London—a “a free visitor destination for the incurably curious” which “explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future.” 

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.

Dwell profiles Freshkills Park in its March 2011 “We Love New York” issue.  Land Use and Outreach Manager Carrie Grassi features as the story’s heroine, speaking candidly about the site’s transformation.  The writing and narrative of this piece, in particular, really resonate with our experience of the site and its shifting identity: it has a storied and contentious past, yes, and it makes for a complex sell, but it is also enormously beautiful, always evolving and full of such promise that it pushes us on in support of an ambitious vision.

Curious what the Freshkills Park site looks like dressed in white?  We’ve added a new set of images to our flickr page featuring the site in its snowy glory.  The vision for the park includes winter recreation activities including cross-country skiing, sledding, snow sculpture contests, snowball fights and other games to keep visitors’ temperatures up during the long, icy winter.

The Winter/Spring issue of the Freshkills Park newsletter, Fresh Perspectives, is up on the official Parks homepage for Freshkills Park.  In this issue are a walk-through of the design for the first phase of South Park, a primer on composting toilets and how they work, and a history and guide to wetlands at the Freshkills Park site.

We meet people all the time who have stories about Fresh Kills.  Folks who live nearby, who used to live where the landfill now is, who worked on-site, who were part of the 9/11 recovery effort, who are part of the team working on landfill closure right now. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/17476706]

The PBS Thirteen series The City Concealed recently featured a segment on the Staten Island Greenbelt. This 2,800-acre continuous corridor of green space provides a host of natural recreational opportunities–including some of the best and most serene hiking in New York City–and acts as a refuge for native wildlife. 

Visitors on the Freshkills Park tour are always excited when we mention that there are deer on-site, but they rarely experience a sighting; deer can be shy when large vehicles and groups of people are on the approach.  But there have, in fact, been a number of sightings. 

The New York City Urban Field Station is a brand new office, laboratory and residence for visiting and resident urban ecology research activities and researchers, located in Fort Totten Park in Bayside, Queens.  The facility is a physical base for The New York City Urban Field Station program, launched in 2006 by the Parks Department and the U.S.

One of the most spectacular sights for visitors to the Freshkills Park site these days  is the installation of final cover on Landfill Section 6/7, the East Mound.  Final cover (also called the landfill cap) is composed of a series of layers of soil, synthetic textile, plastic and grass and is complemented by construction of adequate and sometimes elaborate drainage systems and basins. 

There’s no contest—no other season matches autumn for colors and shapes at the Freshkills Park site.  The grasses and trees are at their highest (or they’ve been mowed, leaving strong contrasts of height and texture), and the reds and golds really stand out among the golden browns and vibrant streaks of still-thriving greens. 

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. 

Sneak Peak was a huge success!  About 1800 people joined us at the Freshkills Park site on Sunday to make and fly kites, canoe in the creeks, walk the site with an expert, ride a pony, pet a goat, make a bag or a birdhouse, learn about composting and recycling and energy efficiency, receive a free bike helmet or fitting, enjoy the fun music, cool crafts and awesome food and generally celebrate the potential of this fascinating and amazing site.