Tags: Freshkills Park

New York City has seen a surge in recreational access to urban waterways over the last 15 years.  There are active canoeing and kayaking outings in the Hudson River, the Bronx River, Jamaica Bay, even Superfund sites like the Gowanus Canal and the Newtown Creek. 

We’ve been eager to host a kite-flying event at the Freshkills Park site since the very beginning of this project.  The grassy, open landfill mounds soar above the surrounding landscape, not only making them high points with incredible views, but also providing access to some prime wind conditions. 

One of the things we’ve learned over the course of this park project is that the Freshkills Park site has been a part of many, many people’s careers: Sanitation workers, engineers, equipment manufacturers, scientists, policymakers, designers, artists, philanthropists—we are constantly astonished to discover a new realm of expertise on this site with which we’re so familiar. 

We’re thrilled to be able to exhibit Mierle Laderman Ukeles‘ work The Social Mirror at Sneak Peak this Sunday!  The piece is a 12-ton, 28-foot long 1979 Department of Sanitation collection truck outfitted in mirror glass.  It made its debut in the 1983 New York City Art Parade and was last publicly exhibited at the 2007 Armory Show.

This week we’re featuring some of the awesome offerings we’ll have on hand at this coming Sunday’s Sneak Peak at Freshkills Park.  First up: The King of Falafel & Shawarma, Fares “Freddy” Zeidais.  Freddy’s already high stock rose even more this past weekend, when he WON THE VENDY CUP at the 2010 Vendy Awards on Governor’s Island (the annual street vendor awards ceremony held by the Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center)! 

We’ve been hard at work putting together the first open, public event EVER at the Freshkills Park site, which will take place Sunday, October 3rd!  ‘Sneak Peak at Freshkills Park‘ will not only be a chance to see the site’s hills and wetlands in all their autumn glory, it will also be a hybrid kite festival/street fair/series of special site tours! 

The Farm City Fair is a festival taking place over three weekends at various Brooklyn sites to celebrate and build knowledge about current practices in urban agriculture.  Farmers, artists and urban planners will be on hand to discuss and present rooftop farm projects, urban homesteading, city beekeeping, parking lot agriculture and more. 

The annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is in Washington, D.C. this weekend, September 10-13.  The design and planning of Freshkills Park will be presented in one of many ‘Education Sessions’ by Ellen Neises, Associate Principal at James Corner Field Operations, and Tatiana Choulika, FO’s Project Manager for Freshkills Park. 

In the wake of our staff canoe tour last October, we’re now looking to gradually expand access to the glimmering creeks of the Freshkills Park site.  Last Sunday, we organized a kayak tour of the site for representatives of community boathouses throughout the City. 

Last Saturday, we hosted what has probably been the most provocative and unusual program we’ve seen yet at the Freshkills Park site (the gauntlet has been thrown down! Our open request for program proposals is here): choreographer Kathy Westwater‘s movement-based piece PARK, developed with collaborators Jennifer Scappettone and Seung Jae Lee. 

Landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations has won the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s 2010 National Design Award for landscape design.  The annual awards aim to build national awareness of design as a tool in a variety of fields (architecture, communication, fashion, interaction, interior, landscape, product) by celebrating “excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement” as represented by a body of work. 

We’re taking another field trip!  The afternoon of Friday, June 25th, members of the Freshkills Park development team will be taking a guided tour of the Park Department’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC) on Staten Island.  And you’re invited.

The GNPC is a 13-acre greenhouse, nursery and seed-bank complex specializing in the collection, cultivation and production of native plant material for the use of habitat restoration within New York City.

Tatiana Choulika—Project Design Manager at James Corner Field Operations for our upcoming project in the southern portion of the Freshkills Park site—gave a great presentation on that design two weeks back at the Arsenal.  Our thanks go to her and to the large crowd that came out to learn about South Park. 

It seems like no New York City site has truly been inaugurated as a public space until it has hosted an avant-garde dance performance.  Our time has come!  A group of artists and performers organized by choreographer Kathy Westwater has developed a movement-based project responding to their research and on-site study of the Freshkills Park site over several visits this spring. 

We received our beautiful, custom Key to the City yesterday from the folks at Creative Time.  Feeling empowered and ready to open up that hidden door in the Brooklyn Museum.  We also installed and verified the locked box inside the Freshkills Park tour bus. 

Working with public art commissioning organization Creative Time, artist Paul Ramírez Jonas has assembled a project called Key to the City that will be taking place throughout New York City this summer.  35,000 specially crafted keys will be given away at daily ‘bestowal ceremonies’ at a kiosk in Times Square from June 3rd to 27th.  

Quick on the heels of our terrific if rainy lecture this past Tuesday, we’re thrilled to host another lecture in our Freshkills Park Talks series this upcoming Wednesday evening, May 26th—this time at the Arsenal, on Central Park.  We’ll be joined by Tatiana Choulika, Senior Associate at landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations, who will be presenting and discussing the design for the first phase of the Southern quadrant of Freshkills Park. 

Our second annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest came to a close at the end of April, and now our esteemed judges have weighed in with their verdicts.  The winners of this year’s contest are:

Adult winners:

Quietly sleeping,
Buried discards of past years
Support vibrant hills

– Stephen Knowles

Now green and growing
This upside-down museum
Forms new paths of hope

– Leona Egan

Tall thousand grasses
rub hollow elbows to the
chopstick cricket legs

– Robin Locke Monda

Student winners:

Looking at the mounds,
you are rolling down the past.

The Spring/Summer issue of the Freshkills Park newsletter, Fresh Perspectives, is up on the official Parks homepage for Freshkills Park.  In this issue are a review of the past year’s expanded tour programs at the Freshkills Park site and a profile of the Department of Sanitation’s compost facility, located just beside the former landfill, in addition to the cover story, which offers a history of the Fresh Kills area before landfilling began in 1948 and an annotated map of historic activities onsite.

Tomorrow evening, Dr. Judith S. Weis, Professor of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University will be talking about and signing copies of her book Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History at the Greenbelt Nature Center on Staten Island.  The book is first a history of American salt marshes, their ecological functions, gradual destruction and several profiles of contemporary restoration projects.