Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Freshkill”
UbuWeb, the large online archive of avant-garde art, has posted a streaming video of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1972 “Freshkill,” filmed at the Fresh Kills Landfill. The short film depicts the destruction of the artist’s truck by a bulldozer. The video is also available for download as an MP4.
Ghost of sanitation infrastructure past
A quiet and handsome set of photographs by Nathan Kensinger showcases the decommissioned Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The station was closed along with the Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001 and is currently unoccupied. Its rehabilitation has recently been put out to bid to private waste management companies for use in barge export of waste, in accordance with the city’s 2006 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan. All of New York City’s trash is now privately carted out of state–much of it via trucking. Barge export (and rail, which already happens in Staten Island and in North Brooklyn) would reduce the city’s sanitation costs significantly.
(via everydaytrash)
Steven Handel on urban restoration ecology
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.
Much of his discussion centered around concepts of ecological sustainability. Some key takeaways: At a site as large as Freshkills Park, it would be costly and unsustainable to plant and maintain the type of landscape found in a more traditional park landscape like Central Park. Dr. Handel emphasized the bang-for-buck of planting small, pioneer clusters of trees and shrubs that could attract bees and birds, which act as pollinators and seed spreaders. He also detailed the value of mosaic plant populations, in which some species can thrive while others shrink in response to evolving conditions. In the face of climate change, this adaptability, he said, would be essential for park resilience over time.
The talk covered much more. We’re grateful to Dr. Handel and to the big crowd that came out to hear him speak. Below are a few audio highlights. Each is 3 to 5 minutes long.
Clip 1: The “ecological services” and other benefits provided by green, sustainable landscapes.
Clip 2: On Dr. Handel’s soil restoration work in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Clip 3: The importance of pollinators and the challenge of aligning engineering goals with ecological goals.
How to Love a Landfill: June 20th at Freshkills Park
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.
For skeptics and true believers alike, we’ve got a terrific event coming up Saturday, June 20th. Robin Nagle, the Department of Sanitation’s Anthropologist-in-Residence, will be giving a a talk and leading a conversation on top of the North Mound about why the Freshkills Park site deserves our love–and why she calls it ’sacred space.’ She’s written an essay that digs into some of the themes she’ll be touching on as we sit out on top of the mound on chairs, blankets and yoga mats. You’re welcome to sign up for the event whether it sounds agreeable, provocative or flighty to you–at the least, you’ll get a free tour of the site out of it, and at the most, contribute to a healthy discussion. This is only our second event like this, but last month’s reading on top of North Mound was fantastic.
Robin is no lightweight: she teaches anthropology and urban studies at NYU and has been Sanitation’s official anthropologist-in-residence since 2006. Over the past several years, she’s been working to establish a New York City Sanitation Museum. She’s thought A LOT about garbage, the Department of Sanitation and Fresh Kills Landfill and has been featured in the New York Times and an episode of This American Life on garbage. We’re pretty excited about her talk.
Saturday, June 20th, 12pm-3pm
A Parks bus will pick up attendees at the St. George Ferry Terminal at 12pm, take them to the event, and deliver them back to the terminal at 2:30 or 3 pm. This event, like all of our events, is free, but space is limited. Contact Martha at martha.powers@parks.nyc.gov to reserve a spot.
The City Concealed
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.
Photographers at Fresh Kills
The interior of a garbage barge is cleaned, Fresh Kills 2001. Photo by Michael Falco
On Saturday, we woke up REALLY early to take a group of professional photographers out on a tour of the Freshkills Park site and catch some prime morning light. What we got was morning fog, at least for half the morning, but our pros still shot some interesting stuff. We hope to share some of those images in the future and to do more photo tours of the site–we’re thinking late summer or early fall for the next one. If you’re a photographer who would be interested in participating, let us know.
Meantime, some of the most dramatic and beautiful existing photos of the site have been taken by Michael Falco, who had exclusive photographic access to Fresh Kills Landfill operations both before and after 9/11.
Robert Moses on Fresh Kills
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. The 1951 Moses plan proposed a series of uses in the area: 100 acres of parks, arterials, and public works, 100 acres of private residential development and a huge industrial zone along the west shore. Some aspects of the plan were eventually adopted, like the construction of the West Shore Expressway (Moses was the force behind construction of most of the city’s expressways), but most were not. Landfilling at Fresh Kills continued over the next 50 years.
The proposal is a fascinating read–and also a reminder of how terrific 1950s graphic design sensibilities were.
Dennis Diggins on Fresh Kills Landfill operations
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.
Even working on the Freshkills Park project every day, the details of Dennis’ talk – this latter part especially – were mostly unfamiliar and totally amazing to us. Sanitation provided lighting, fuel, dust suppression and 50% of the material trucking from Ground Zero. 1000 Sanitation workers cleaned up Wall Street the weekend after 9/11 to allow business to resume. Dennis was clearly proud of his staff’s work – he called it “awe inspiring.” More than one person remarked afterward that we need an oral history project like StoryCorps to interview the Sanitation workers involved in Fresh Kills operations and in the 9/11 recovery effort to record their stories for posterity. We think so too.
Next month’s talk will be given by Ed Toth, Director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, who will discuss the value of locally appropriate planting and detail the Center’s role in special conservation and reclamation projects around the city, including Freshkills Park. April 23rd, 7:30 pm at the Staten Island Museum, just a short walk from the St. George Ferry Terminal.
Blog à blog: critique of the Freshkills Park design
Just found this on Where: a critical response to the Freshkills Park plan prompted by last November’s New York Magazine feature. The thrust of the critique is that the Field Operations’ design of Freshkills Park will create a landscape that can be falsely “consumed without guilt:”
All the capping and veiling and the sealing tight are carried out not only to elude dealing with material run-off of the waste, but also to distract from what that waste means and implies and reflects (the architects and the city want to avoid any leaks, physical or moral).
While we don’t speak for Field Operations, we think it would be a shame to lose scope of the site’s historic role in the city’s waste chain. Capping the landfill is not an aesthetic or moral choice–it’s federally mandated–but we have chosen for our arts and educational programming to give due attention to landfilling and waste management. So will future arts and educational facilities on site and interpretive signage. A park, after all, is defined by more than its design or its designers.
Even considering the landscape apart from its programming, it would be difficult to suppress the site’s identity given the inherent unnatural topography of four enormous landfill mounds and the ongoing, long-term monitoring and maintenance of on-site Sanitation infrastructure like landfill gas wells, gas flare stations and landfill byproduct processing facilities. There are the views, too: from atop those elegantly designed 150- to 200-foot mounds, park visitors will have bird’s-eye vistas of the Staten Island Waste Transfer Station, the Fresh Kills Compost Facility and the DSNY Crushing and Screening Facility, all situated adjacent to the park for the foreseeable future. Not to mention Carteret, NJ’s tank farms dotting the shore of the very industrial Arthur Kill. There’s no ignoring the context in which Freshkills Park is situated and the significance of the site in that context.
The critique sets up a dichotomy between making a place better and learning from it, but we think the Field Operations design allows for both. It lets the public feel comfortable entering this space that was once a source of shame and experiencing the scope–and the grandeur–of a site they’ve helped to create, but until now have been unable to see or even conceptualize. This is our opinion, anyway, but we’re biased. There’s been a bit of dialogue about this issue already. What do you think?
Anniversaries and due credit
The last barge of garbage arrives at Fresh Kills Landfill, March 22, 2001.
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. As with most good ideas, it’s not clear whether Leverock’s impassioned and detailed 1987 letter to higher-ups at the Department of Sanitation was the actual inspiration for the plan, or whether the idea germinated independently.
Who knows where ideas come from or how they travel? People seem to possess a natural resistance to new ideas, probably because they oftentimes require change. A fellow named Howard Aiken once observed: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
