Tags: history

The New York Times features a 2,200 square foot native woodland garden being planted on the NYU campus.  George Reis, NYU’s supervisor of sustainable landscapes, was taken with the idea of evocative and site-specific planting, as well as with the Manahatta Project, an exhibition that envisions the island of Manhattan upon Henry Hudson’s arrival 400 years ago. 

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

Another poster child for the reclamation of disturbed lands: AMD&ART Park in Vintondale, PA.  By the mid-’90s, coal mining in this part of Appalachia had resulted in severe acid mine drainage (AMD) into waterways and general public resignation to a major environmental hazard. 

[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.

For the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival at Manahatta Island, the Wildlife Conservation Society and ecologist Eric W. Sanderson have prepared the Manahatta Project, a massive GIS-based portrait of the topography and ecology of Manhattan as it was in 1609.

Here’s great find from our archives: a November 1951 proposal for development at Fresh Kills issued under legendary Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.  The City of New York began filling in Fresh Kills in 1948, initially with the idea of depositing “clean fill” there for three years to make the land developable. 

Thanks to everyone who came out to last Thursday’s talk on the history of operations at Fresh Kills.  Dennis Diggins’ fascinating and wide-ranging overview touched on the history of sanitary landfills and the city’s solid waste management system, the evolution of equipment used for transporting, compacting and containing waste, Dennis’ own personal anecdotes about working at Fresh Kills from 1991-2006 (including the sage advice: “Don’t walk with your hands in your pockets in a landfill,” because if you trip and fall your hands are the only things keeping you from falling head first into the trash) and the Department of Sanitation’s tremendous role in the clean-up and investigation of the World Trade Center attack in the days and months following 9/11.

With the 8th anniversary of the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill coming up, the Staten Island Advance’s blog, The Staten Island Notebook, published this story reviewing the steps preceding the landfill’s closure.  The story singles out one man, former Fresh Kills crane operator John Leverock, as a possible progenitor of the idea to close Fresh Kills and to containerize and export the city’s waste, as the current Solid Waste Management Plan prescribes. 

In January, Forgotten NY took a tour of the St. George Theater and some of the gorgeous old houses in St. George, the neighborhood hugging the ferry terminal in Staten Island.  SI-based artist and author Cynthia Von Buhler (who, with her husband Russell Farhang, compile our favorite Staten Island blog, The Prodigal Borough) helped lead the tour and gave a guided tour of their own incredible home.