Tags: Freshkills Park

This Saturday and Sunday, October 10th and 11th, is Open House New York weekend.  OHNY’s 7th annual offerings include building tours and site visits of unique locations across the five boroughs.  Staten Island is represented by its array of historic buildings as well as two Parks-related listings: Freshkills Park and the Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC). 

Randy Ludacer’s performance at the Freshkills Park site last Saturday was terrific.  An eager audience poured out of our Parks bus at North Mound to hear Randy serenede them (and the millions of tons of discarded packaging buried underfoot) with the new album of songs he’d recorded for the event, including “The Prettiest Package” and “This Landfill is Your Landfill.” 

We’ve updated our flickr stream with photos from the Composting Workshop we held at the end of August and last weekend’s reading from the works of Robert Frost.  Both events were rainy but drew enthusiastic and game crowds and speakers. 

Time.com has posted a short video piece on the history and transformation of the Freshkills Park site, featuring Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh and Department of Sanitation Anthropologist-in-Residence, Robin Nagle.

Randy Ludacer has unveiled the design scheme for the “Songs About Packaging” CD he will be giving away during his Saturday, September 26th performance at the Freshkills Park site.  Each package is a miniature pop-art homage to items found in his recycling bin, paying respect to the product’s original design while commenting on its disposable nature.

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

We really enjoyed last Friday’s tour of the green roof atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Technical Services Complex.  The roof is gorgeous and inspiring, and it’s worth checking out our flickr photos (and videos) of the tour if you weren’t able to make it. 

This Saturday is the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance’s City of Water Day, a festival celebrating the potential of the City’s waterfront.  There will be plenty of free entertainment, education and activities, including boat tours, local bands, award-winning food vendors and lots of special children’s events.

For our Freshkills Park Talk two weeks back, Dr. Steven Handel shared insights into the emerging field of urban restoration ecology, which focuses on the challenge of bringing ecological diversity back to degraded lands like brownfields and landfills.  He discussed his research at the Freshkills Park site and others in the region and went on to describe how his expertise has informed the design of Orange County, CA’s Great Park.

Installation of composting toilets in public facilities is catching on.  In New York City, The Bronx Zoo and Queens Botanical Garden have been operating restrooms with composting toilets, with no need for sewer lines, for the last few years.   The technology in both facilities is made by Clivus Multrum and resembles a conventional toilet, except that it uses only 3-6 ounces of water, in combination with a bio-compostable foam, for flushing. 

We had a great time co-hosting Tuesday night’s panel discussion on public art with the Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI).  All of the panelists make exciting and engaging work, and they had a lot to say about the ways in which financing, permissions and public interaction have played into their work (or the work they curate). 

Last Saturday’s downpour didn’t faze the hardy group of about 30 that came out to hear Robin Nagle’s talk on top of North Mound at the Freshkills Park site.  Our coming together “not in protest but in appreciation” for what was buried beneath our feet, in spite of the rain, was strong foundation for Robin’s claim that we can love a landfill. 

The generous folks at Nikon cut us a sweet deal on a few pairs of their new Ecobins binoculars. They’re manufactured with lead- and arsenic-free glass and built with non-chloride rubber that uses no harmful inks or dyes.  The straps and carrying bags are produced from sustainable eucalyptus and manufactured with minimal waste. 

One of the panelists at next Tuesday evening’s panel discussion on public art, The Challenges and Channels of Public Art Production, is Mierle Ukeles, who is the Department of Sanitation’s Artist-in-Residence and contributed to the Freshkills Park master planning process as a Percent for Art artist. 

Monday evening, we’ll be holding a public hearing on the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) for the roads system that is to connect across Freshkills Park.  The Supplemental EIS is a document that analyzes the potential environmental impacts of the proposed road alignment, construction and phasing, particularly in the East Park section of Freshkills Park, as well as the impacts of alternatives to the proposed alignment.  

The upcoming week is a busy one for us.  Three terrific public events focused on different aspects of the Freshkills Park site: waste, art and ecology.  They’re all free, and we hope to see you at one or more of them. 

Photographer Willie Chu took some gorgeous images of the Freshkills Park site during our incredibly foggy, early morning photographers tour in early May.  We hope we can exhibit these eventually.  We’d like to do another photographers tour in the late summer or early fall–if you’re a professional photographer who would like to participate, please let us know.

We get a lot of raised eyebrows when we first talk about the Freshkills Park Project with the uninitiated.  Some folks are put off by the idea of landfills in general, and some are familiar with the stigma the site has given Staten Island over the past half century.

[vimeo vimeo.com/4854719]

The newest episode of PBS Thirteen’s online video series The City Concealed features Freshkills Park.  Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh gives a guided tour of the site and its history, punctuating the scenic drive with a look around the landscape of the future South Park and a view into the Department of Sanitation’s waste byproduct treatment facilities.

Our big thanks to Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from Field Operations for last Thursday’s Freshkills Park Talk on designing the park. Jerome delivered a great primer on landscape architecture (including a history in two slides!) and talked about the mandate for new model of practice given the nature of the site and the enormity of the project, both in space and time scale.