Steel mill to wind farm

The 30-acre Bethlehem Steel Mill on Lake Erie was in operation for almost 80 years and was closed in the mid-1970s.  Contaminated with steel slag and industrial waste, the site was idle for 30 years.  In May 2002, the EPA awarded the City of Lackawanna a $200,000 grant to investigate the site’s potential for reuse.  It was ultimately developed into a wind farm, limiting the excavation of contaminated soil (the site remains closed to the public) and making use of existing power transmission infrastructure.  BQ Energy, UPC Wind and the City of Lackawanna chose 2.5 MW wind turbines developed by Clipper Windpower.  8 turbines were installed, generating 50 KWh worth of wind energy and powering 9,000 homes annually.

Beautifying power capture

Diagrams from SolarBotanic that demonstrate the concepts behind photovoltaic, thermovoltaic and piezoelectric energy capture at work in their "nanoleaves."

Integrating solar and wind power capture into natural and urban environments isn’t just a technical or engineering task–it’s also a design opportunity.  Some recent eye-popping ideas have ranged from a dragonfly-shaped urban farm on Roosevelt Island to a snakeskin-like PV-tiled stadium in Taiwan.  Here’s another via Scientific American: artificial trees with fluttering “nanoleaves,” an effort by London’s Solar Botanic Renewable Energy Systems to convert light, heat and wind energy into electricity.

Solar Botanic’s ambitious plan involves bringing together three different energy-generation technologies—photovoltaics (aka solar power, or electricity from visible sunlight), thermoelectrics (electricity from heat) and piezoelectrics (electricity from pressure)—all in the unassuming shape of a leaf on its stem.

Place thousands of these units, dubbed nanoleaves, on a natural-looking, though fake plastic tree—and one could have electricity production without spoiling natural landscapes, van der Beek says.

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.

Like Freshkills Park, but in Israel

The Hiriya Landfill and the master plan for Ariel Sharon Park.

The Hiriya landfill in Tel Aviv, a 2,000-acre site adjacent to the city’s airport, has a lot in common with the Freshkills Park site.  From 1952 to 1999, the landfill was Israel’s largest garbage disposal site, at one point receiving one third of the country’s waste.  Its closure is taking a big strain off of the airport, whose skies were clouded by flocks of birds hovering around the dump.

Hiriya is currently undergoing a transformative re-design process to become Ariel Sharon Park—a productive landscape that will serve as a symbol of Israel’s growing environmental awareness.  Energy will be harvested from landfill gas and leachate outflow will be curbed.  The park is scheduled to start welcoming visitors to enjoy its wildlife and walking and biking paths in 2011. There’s already an education center at the bottom of the mound that’s decked out in recycled furnishings and artwork.  Even the lingering smell of nearby garbage (which is where the similarities to Freshkills Park end) can’t seem to keep curious minds away.  The project has attracted a lot of attention; here’s an article in the New York Times and another, more recent one in the Jewish Week.

Manhattan, primeval

Digital re-creation by Markley Boyer

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. The research behind the Manahatta Project drew from historical maps,  soil cores, tree rings, contemporary field work and a variety of historical accounts. The centerpiece of the now-finished decade-long project is a digital interactive map. The project has also produced lesson plans for grade school and high school students which draw on the new body of knowledge on Manhattan’s original ecology. Beyond providing a historical and educational resource, the project is intended to spur conversation about the present and future urban ecologies of New York City.

The project is being showcased at the Museum of the City of New York now through October 12.

Field Operations on Designing Freshkills Park

Our big thanks to Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from Field Operations for last Thursday’s Freshkills Park Talk on designing the park. Jerome delivered a great primer on landscape architecture (including a history in two slides!) and talked about the mandate for new model of practice given the nature of the site and the enormity of the project, both in space and time scale. Grace walked us through the design concepts for three early projects: the Digger signage project, Schmul Park and North Park Phase A, and talked about how these projects—especially North Park—bring into specific play the grander ideas of the Draft Master Plan for the park as a whole. A number of the crowd’s questions dealt with maintenance and operations of the park: how it will be staffed, how its cleanliness will be ensured. This was a good opportunity to clarify the separate roles of the designers and the city: we at the Parks Department are responsible for the park and, jointly with the Department of Sanitation, will be in charge of its day-to-day operation.

A PDF of Jerome and Grace’s presentation is available here (it’s a 10MB download). Below are a couple of choice audio clips, each between 3 and 5 minutes long, from the talk. It’s useful to follow along with the PDF while they talk, since they refer to images a lot; each clip indicates the first slide it references.

Clip 1: A brief history of landscape architecture. Starts on Slide 12, “Context.”

Clip 2: Time, space and what makes Freshkills Park so unique. Starts on Slide 18, “2011 / 2016 / 2036.”

Clip 3: A walk through the Field Operations design for Schmul Park. Starts on Slide 42, “Schmul Park.”

Next month’s talk, “Urban Ecology at Fresh Kills,” will be given by Dr. Steven Handel from Rutgers University, who has conducted ecological research at Fresh Kills since the early 1990s. Dr. Handel will be talking about what we can learn from Fresh Kills in developing strategies for restoring ecology in our cities.  As always, this event is free of charge.
June 25th, 7:30 pm at the Staten Island Museum.

Freshkills Park and MAS, together again

Last week, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) hosted a panel called Urban Parks in the Twenty-First Century: Creating a New Model.  Park designers, administrators and other experts discussed the some of New York City’s most innovative new park projects: Concrete Plant Park  in the South Bronx, Riverside South on the Upper West Side, and, of course, Freshkills Park.  Presentations and discussion focused on the travails of developing sustainable parks on challenging sites in the current fiscal climate.

MAS was instrumental in making the Freshkills Park project happen way back when the landfill was closed in 2001.  Freshkills Park Administrator Eloise Hirsh spoke at the event about where that early support has carried us thusfar. The folks at MAS put together the clip above (also viewable on the MAS page) with some of the highlights of Eloise’s talk.  Their archive of Freshkills Park-related events and content is here.