One Generation’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure

Far from the recently renovated Saint George Terminal, where the Staten Island ferry pulls in from Manhattan, lies the Fresh Kills Landfill, a region of almost mythic standing in the imagination of most New Yorkers. This is the last resting place of all the bottles and fish heads, all the mangled lamps and busted stereos and rotting fruits that, by the millions of tons, our citizens discarded over half a century, from 1948 until Fresh Kills closed in 2001. Here is the accumulated id-like substratum of the great Metropolis, the part that we rarely acknowledge and almost never see firsthand.Lying scarcely a stone’s throw from New Jersey, at the confluence of several streams, Fresh Kills is in part the victim of its name. Originally a Dutch term that meant nothing more unsavory than a fresh stream, it now seems, because of its more recent use, to hold out insalubrious associations with death and raw sewage. One reaches the landfill by driving half an hour into the hinterland of New York’s least populous borough, past suburbia through what feels at times like open country.The first thing one notices upon arrival is that the place looks nothing like what one expected or even feared, nothing like what it was when fully operational. Back then, the garbage was piled up in enormous parti-colored mounds that lay naked to the sky. Day and night the dump-trucks brought their loads and massive cranes sifted with almost hideous grace through the refuse, teasing it with an artist’s care. On a recent visit, I was accompanied by a guide who had once worked at the site. He told me that, at night, it had not been uncommon to see two-foot long rats (“easily the size of a full-grown cat”) scurrying contentedly among the trash.Now, five years after Fresh Kills was closed down, the mounds have been so successfully “capped” — that is, covered in soil and seeded — that it has become a landscape of rolling hills and open fields. In fact, it is likely that this is how Manhattan itself (from a Lenape Indian word meaning “island of hills”) looked before the first Europeans arrived, indeed before the first humans came 10,000 years ago. The rats have given way to a more welcome fauna. Birds, from hawks to seagulls, fly among the four main hills, and white-tailed deer have also been spotted. Amid the fresh odor of water and fields, there is little to disturb this bucolic illusion, other than an occasional gas processing plant that dots the landscape, or the storage facility for heavy machinery that belongs to the Sanitation Department and now sits unused.Several months ago, the department of city planning released its masterplan for the landfill, which, at 2,315 acres, is nearly three times the size of Central Park. Throughout the post-industrial world it has been the tendency, for the past decade at least, to redeem our superannuated urban infrastructure in the name of leisure and culture. The High-Line on the far West Side of Manhattan, which will soon become a park, is a dramatic case in point. And so it should come as no surprise that Fresh Kills as well — which in fact is only 45% landfill — will be reborn as a park.Like most master plans, the lovely brochure released by the mayor’s office is almost certainly different from what will eventually materialize here. But its broad outlines seem sufficiently plausible that it might one day become a reality. The park will consist of four quadrants that correspond to the four mounds that rise above 50 years of refuse and are divided by various streams. Stretches of wetland, grassland, and woodland promise enough diversity for the city to envisage football fields, science centers, boating areas, and much more. These are to be implemented gradually, in three phases over the next 30 years.Although Fresh Kills was officially closed in March of 2001, it reopened briefly only a few months later to receive the 1.2 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center that were removed from ground zero. It is a somewhat heady thought that the Twin Towers, far from vanishing, still exist — admitted reconstituted — and that they now lie under the thin layer of grass and top soil that covers the West Mound. In the city’s vision, this will one day become the West Park, an enduring memorial of the attacks of September 11, 2001.To see Fresh Kills today, one is hard put to imagine how it could ever function as much more than a nature preserve, something along the lines of a national park rather than an urban park. And yet, consider that when Central Park was first conceived in the 1850s, though it may have been central to the island of Manhattan, it was far to the north of what most contemporaries would have understood as New York City. But the city planners of 150 years ago foresaw that the population would swell northward in the fullness of time and that Central Park would itself serve as a catalyst to that development.Consider also that, however rural parts of Staten Island seem today, they are no more rural than Manhattan was a little over a century ago. It may be that this vast borough, already far more developed than it was only two decades ago, will one day hold the key to the perennial housing shortage that plagues New York City. And if that proves to be the case, Fresh Kills Park might just turn out to be one of the most visionary developments in New York in over 100 years.

One Generation’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure

One Generation’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure

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