View of Fresh Kills Park from Richmond Avenue Bridge, 2012
production. As late as 1886, the City dumped almost three quarters of the 1.3 million cartloads of refuse collected that year into the Atlantic Ocean with the effect that ships were often unable to reach the city’s port because of floating debris. That same year, the reduction method was developed in Buffalo as a means to recover grease and other valuable by-products from garbage by cooking it and squeezing out its valuable liquid contents. The resulting stench is not difficult to imagine, nor are the ‘dark coloured liquids’ that ran off into nearby streams and rivers. The inauguration of the reduction method would soon mark the beginning of Staten Island’s own garbage woes when, in 1916, debate erupted over a proposal to build a new reduction plant on what was then just a hinterland of New York proper. Despite the staggering 1,700 pages of testimony produced by residents at the hearing and the State Commissioner of Health’s misgivings, plans went ahead and a reduction plant was built on the island’s western shore near the salty mouth of the Fresh Kills river. For a period spanning two world wars, Staten Island remained a preferred, albeit diminutive, dumping ground for New York’s more populous boroughs. Then, in the short wake of an incipient post- war urbanism and at the hands of the powerful New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Staten Island’s waste history took an abrupt turn for the worse. Along with incised highways, the destruction of inner city slums and other ruthless modernisms, Fresh Kills Landfill was created by Moses in 1948. Sited in a salt marsh on Staten Island’s western shore, waste from the temporary landfill was meant to provide low-cost fill for the inclined approach to a bridge connecting Staten Island with Brooklyn. ‘Not merely a means of disposing of the city’s refuse in an efficient, sanitary and unobjectionable manner pending the building of incinerators’, Moses claimed, Fresh Kills was ‘the greatest single opportunity for community planning in this City.’ Moses was wrong. By 1955 the community on Staten Island had the world’s largest sanitary landfill, a title it would preserve until its
closure almost fifty years later. Emblazoned on t-shirts and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records , Fresh Kills became an iconic pile of waste spread out over 2,200 acres and reaching heights of 225 feet. Moses’ legacy could be seen from space. By 1991, Fresh Kills was the only landfill still operating inside New York’s city limits. The majority of New York City’s waste was exported to incineration facilities in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Furious at decision-makers who singled Staten Island out to bear the burden of New York City’s waste, in 1993 Staten Island residents voted 81% in favour of seceding from the city. The secession movement was de-fused by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, elected on the same ballot, who promised Staten Island residents a free ferry service and an end to the notorious landfill. On the 1996 agreement brokered by Giuliani to end tipping at the landfill, the New York Times later reported how ‘the landfill that had helped create Staten Island’s held-apart status, and thus became part of the mechanism through which that perceived inferiority was finally shattered.’ In June 1996 a decree came into effect preventing the disposal of waste inside New York’s city limits after 2001. With the last barge of municipal solid waste set to arrive ceremoniously at Fresh Kills on March 22, 2001, the City formed a committee to organise an international design competition for the master planning of the soon-to-be-closed landfill site. Announced on September 5 as Fresh Kills: Landfill to Landscape , it would transform this contoversial site into an important asset for Staten Island, the city and the region. Six days after the design competition was announced, the World Trade Centre collapsed. The landfill was re-opened and over a ten month period 1.2 million tons of material from the World Trade Center site was sorted and buried in the West Mound at Fresh Kills. Screened and sifted for remains and effects after the FBI, NYPD and the Office of Emergency Management decided that all recovery efforts had been exhausted, the debris was buried over an area of 48 acres.
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Mounds of soil destined to form future park space at Fresh Kills, 2012
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