Dustin Valen
However, as recently as 2007, families of 9/11 victims were filing papers to unearth the debris on Staten Island that they believed contained human remains. In 2003, New York City’s medical examiner had said that while ‘many ... remains [were] cremated by the initial conflagration and the subterranean fires that burned for months’, it was ‘virtually certain that at least some human tissue is mixed with the dirt at the Staten Island landfill’. In June 2003, landscape architects James Corner and Stan Allen of Field Operations were selected to develop a master plan for the park project. Called, seemingly without irony, Lifescape, a new parkland for New York City , their master plan proposed to weave together on the site public programming with habitat restoration and a host of cultural, athletic and educational activities while honouring the events of September 11th ‘in a dignified and unique way’. With an array of highly engineered systems for the management of its buried and decaying waste, the transformation of Fresh Kills Park will entail the installation of a continuous impermeable cap over each mound to stop rainwater from reaching the buried waste, and a landfill gas recovery plant will transform methane gas captured in a network of buried pipes into fuel for domestic use.
At once ‘curing’ the site of its pollutants, the new vegetative skin at Fresh Kills reorients its programme from stink, controversy and tragedy to one of amenable pleasure. But the public gain, in this case, would also seem to be its great loss. A truly public place is one where different publics and their histories can still be felt. Given the vogue for describing reclaimed sites as palimpsests of human activity, it is lamentable that this metaphor is often limited to the infrastructures and ecologies that result from human activity with little or no regard for the profound impact that conflict and irresolution can have on the perception of a place. Failing to engage history and temporality as diminsions of the public in the design of public parks, a layer of green serves to repudiate a tremendously important part of our heritage and its latent influence. Without history as a backdrop against which to evaluate the success (or irony) of ongoing developments at Fresh Kills Park, its transformation is at once a monumental achievement and a monumental loss — 150 million tons of social detritus eliminated for a second time from the collective imagination of its makers. c
79 1 see ‘The Sisyphus Project’ by Clinton Langevin, Amy Norris and Chester Rennie in On Site 29 ; Karianne Halse’s ‘Landscape Processes’ in On Site 29; Maya Przybylski’s ‘Land Reservations: landfill as connector’ in On Site 26 . 2 For an excellent account of New York City’s waste history see Benjamin Miller’s Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York – The Last Two Hundred Years (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000); …the rotting carcases of horses and cattle were simply tossed into rivers surrounding the city, where they remained for weeks, stinking and bloated, floating in and out with the tides.” 3 Called Floyd Benett Field today, and no longer an island, Dead Horse Bay off the southern shore of the former Barren Island is haunting testament to the area’s gruesome past.
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