Over the breezy, soft hills of Freshkills Park, on south-west Staten Island, you can see the spiky crown of Manhattan’s skyline. The city’s newest, most ambitious park is three times the size of world-famous Central Park and is being designed by the same architect. But don’t let the bucolic mounds and the quiet meanders trick you – underneath the grassy layer of makeup lies Staten Island’s most shameful past.
These once healthy wetlands, pumped by clean creeks and home to a wide array of animal and plant species, inspired Dutch settlers to name it «Fresh Kills» – meaning «fresh waters» – when they docked on the island in the 17th century. But by the 20th century, as New York grew both horizontally and vertically, the sandy foundations of the area were not fit for residential construction.
Fresh Kills did not escape Robert Moses’ ruthless plans to build the «capital of the world.» In 1948, the master builder – or, depending on who you ask, master destroyer – of modern New York City, decided to use the area as a temporary garbage dump, with hopes that adding layers and layers of solid waste for about three years would make for a reliable construction foundation. But years went by, and garbage did not stop coming. Quite the opposite.
By the mid-1950s, as New York grew more and more crowded, Fresh Kills became the biggest landfill in the world. At its peak, its 12 square kilometres of land digested nearly 30,000 tons of garbage per day. The smell was unbearable. Neighbors would have to keep their windows closed all summer, when the trash simmered under the heat. The sky was taken by white moving particles, a nightmarish mix of bloated plastic bags and hangry seagulls. Hordes and hordes of them.
Years went by and landfills in other parts of the city closed their doors, while Staten Island’s shameful, stinky landscape only grew taller. Neighbors saw no end to the mountains of trash taking over their window view and started worrying about the fumes and chemicals they were breathing. Reports came out about people getting sick from contamination.
«I remember many people contacting the office almost on a weekly basis saying, my child has asthma, my child has cancer, is this because of the landfill?» Meagan Deveraux, who worked for Staten Island President’s Office in the mid-1990s says in a documentary about Fresh Kills.
By the early 1990s, Fresh Kills became the only dump left for the whole of New York city’s garbage. Sanitation barges managed by the Navy peacefully sailed down the East River, their heavy bellies full of trash from the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and they relieved themselves in the fifth borough, also known as «the forgotten borough.»
«Nobody on 5th Avenue knew where their garbage was going, and they didn’t care as long as it went,» Brian J. Laline, editor of the newspaper Staten Island Advance, said in the documentary. «Out of sight, out of mind.»
Fresh Kills came to very graphically expose how New York has always seen and treated Staten Island – as its dumping ground.
Staten Island’s Borough president in the 1990s, Guy Molinari, made closing the Fresh Kills landfill a priority under his tenure. «I always had the feeling that people in the other boroughs didn’t give a damn about us,» Molinari said. With the help of local organizers, they used environmental laws to negotiate with the new city mayor, Rudy Giuliani. A bill setting an end date for Fresh Kills closure signed in 1996.
The last garbage ship, decorated with a celebratory red, white and blue band, docked on Fresh Kills on March 22, 2001. Staten Islanders saw this day as the end of an era – they would finally get the fresh start they deserved. The city rolled out its plans to turn Freshkills into an idyllic park – its name rebranded into one word – and opened up a competition for landscape architects.
But Fresh Kills remained quiet for a short period of time. On September 11, 2001, two planes crashed into Manhattan’s Twin Towers in a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 people. That day, the world changed. And Fresh Kills couldn’t say no to this one last shipment.
The city did not know where to put the 1.8 million tons of rubble from the terrorist attack. Fresh Kills sounded like the only sizable option amidst the overwhelming circumstances. But this job would be very different than the one Fresh Kills was used to conduct: among the scraps of concrete, contorted metal, pulverized glass and burnt wood there were also human remains. Long, transparent plastic tents were set up. Inside, dressed in white plastic suits, face masks and blue construction helmets, volunteers from all over the country lined up along a factory-like running band to carefully examine tons and tons of rubble for any trace of human remains.
Only 60 percent of 9/11 victims have been positively identified so far. Since the first DNA tests started in 2001, forensic scientists have been playing catch with the latest DNA technology, hoping that the new advances will allow them to up the percentage of identified victims, one person at a time. In a letter to the families, New York City chief medical examiner Charles Hirsch wrote in 2006: «I cannot predict how many or the time it will take. My colleagues and I reiterate our commitment to you: we will never quit.»
Today, the debris from the attack shapes hills number 1 and 9 of Freshkills Park. For some victims’ families, the mounds are a constant reminder of the city’s disrespectful treatment towards the victims.
«A landfill is no place to honor the dead. And yet, the families of those killed in the largest attack on American soil are forced to pay their respects at our nation’s largest garbage dump,» wrote Anthony Gardner and Diane Horning on a New York Daily News op-ed in 2008. Gardner’s brother Harvey and Horning’s son Matthew were killed on 9/11.
There’s no trace of plastic bags and seagulls in the air today, but lots of northern harriers, red-tailed hawks, yellowlegs – even some bold eagles. Its green, man-made meadows look natural and easy, but underneath them there are sophisticated systems, like the shiny pipes coming out of the ground to treat toxic leachate (contaminated dripping from the residue mix) and gasses. A Herculean effort to reverse over half a century of shame.
Visitors quietly wander around the trails or kayak on the peaceful waters. Underneath their feet, layers and layers of painful history accumulate on Fresh Kills. They will all go through the unavoidable process of decomposing. Some smells just take longer to get rid of than others.