Tags: Freshkills Park

Two new discoveries that offer podcasted ruminations on landscape architecture practice and projects: LANDCAST is a collaboration between landscape architect and blogger Christian Barnard and documentarian Adrien Sala and positions itself as “the voice of contemporary landscape culture”—an NPR-like program about emerging topics in landscape issues; Terragrams, hosted by landscape architect Craig Verzone, is a series of long-form interviews with prominent landscape architects about their work and the ideas that inform it. 

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/9859255]

The Staten Island Borough President’s office has put together this fun video quiz about Staten Island parks, all viewed from the air.  So much beautiful landscape!  Borough of Parks, indeed.

National Poetry Month is coming to a close.  For the second year in a row, we’ve invited people 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.

More photos from our March photographers’ tour of the Freshkills Park site: Richard Levine has taken some beautiful shots not only this year (the first half of this slideshow), but also while the site was still open as a landfill, more than nine years ago (the second half).

Last month’s professional photographers’ tour of the Freshkills Park site yielded some beautiful results.  We’ve posted a selection of photos by Linda Jaquez, Vincent Verdi and Michael Bonanno in our flickr stream; photographs by Jarred Sutton are posted on his website.

If you’re not a biologist or a wildlife hobbyist, it can be hard to understand what the big deal is about birds, bats and other creatures at the Freshkills Park site—why are our birding tours always booked months in advance?  Why so much concern—huge sections of environmental review documents, regulatory review on issues of habitat fragmentation—for the welfare of populations of small animals, when the site is so big?

We’re very excited to present our most recent phase of design work, in South Park, tonight at the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island.  The Freshkills Park development team and park designers from James Corner Field Operations will be there to virtually guide the gathered crowd the first phase of South Park, which will host softball fields, hiking and biking paths, play areas, a parking lot and flexible event spaces.

Last Sunday’s bird-watching tour at the Freshkills Park site was eventful.  Not only did we catch a glimpse of a snow goose fishing around the storm water basin on East Mound, we also noticed this osprey sitting in a nest atop the tall perch in Main Creek. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues on Tuesday with a talk and slideshow by  Nathan Kensinger, a photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on the abandoned and post-industrial edges of New York City.  He’ll be sharing stories of sites along the Gowanus Canal, inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and at Fresh Kills, among others, while walking us through his beautiful images.

Currently on view at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor in Staten Island is Hope-A-Holic, a group exhibition of 21 artists exploring Utopian ideas in contemporary work. The show features installation, drawing, painting, video, performance and interactive works.

Architecture and urbanism blog mammoth has compiled its review of the best architecture of the past decade.  It’s a refreshing list because of its inclusion of projects that stretch outside of what is typically considered ‘architecture’–the Large Hadron Collider, Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, the MIT Media Lab’s City Car, the iPhone.

This past Sunday’s birdwatching tour at the Freshkills Park site is featured in today’s New York Times (and also on the City Room blog, where you can read and post comments).  The sky was overcast and hazy, but we still spotted a dozen or more red-tailed hawks and several northern harriers in addition to meadowlarks, buffleheads, hooded mergansers and great black backed gulls. 

We’ve uploaded a new flickr photo set of the Freshkills Park site in the glorious aftermath of the weekend’s snowstorm.  In most parts of New York City, snowfall is beautiful for the first hour and then gets plowed and turns gray and hangs around for two months, but, for the most part, it stays pretty pristine here on top of the mounds. 

A new study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is underway to assess the role US forests and soils can play in limiting emissions through carbon capture. The first phase of the study found that forests in the lower 48 states currently store about 90 billion metric tons of carbon and continue to capture about 30% of the country’s fossil fuel emissions each year.

James Corner, founder and director of landscape architecture and urban design firm Field Operations, will speak about the firm’s current projects this evening at Cooper Union, hosted by the Architectural League of New York.  In addition to designing the Freshkills Park master plan and first phase projects, Field Operations continues to tackle a number of diverse and high-profile projects including The High Line and the 4,500-acre Shelby Farms Park in Memphis. 

We’re excited to restart our Freshkills Park lecture series, Freshkills Park Talks, this coming Monday, December 7th.  Eli Cohen of Israel’s Ayala Water & Ecology will be speaking about his work designing naturally-based solutions to help remove contaminants from soil, air, and bodies of water and to rebuild ecosystems’ capacity for self-sustainability. 

Photographer Nathan Kensinger has posted a set of terrific photos and his impressions of the Freshkills Park site, collected during our photographers’ tour last month.  We’ve been doing these tours every few months; if you’re a professional photographer interested in participating in future photo tours, feel free to be in touch.

New York Times feature Entry Level profiles Freshkills Park’s Programming and Grants Manager, Raj Kottamasu.  In addition to being part of the planning and implementation team for the project, Raj works with artists to develop onsite projects, initiates and organizes programs and events, manages and seeks grants for park projects and edits and designs our publications.

Last week, the Parks Department’s Freshkills Park team and Staten Island Urban Park Rangers took a canoe trip through the site’s creeks and wetlands.  We put in at “The Point,” near the Isle of Meadows, and headed east through Fresh Kills Creek to Main Creek, where we got up close and personal with the William T.

We’re excited to present a new giveaway we’ve started distributing on our free, public bus tours of the Freshkills Park site: packets of native meadow seed!  This seed was wild-collected in the New York metro area by the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, which will be operating a seven-acre founder seed farm in our first phase of North Park development.