A Washington Post article from the era called the landfill the primary reason most islanders cite for wanting to end ties with the rest of the city; residents, the paper reported, had come to see the landfill as a fetid symbol of its strained relationship with the larger city. Fresh Kills Landfill Report - Joseph Borelli These three Republicans had worked together to close the dump that Mr. Molinaris father first protested when it opened in 1948, a time when Fresh Kills was a saltwater marsh where kids swam. These days the Fresh Kills landfill is somewhere between its infamous, stinking past and its future as Freshkills Park, a 2,200-acre park with meadows and wetlands and a strange-looking name. Over the years, I have often stopped outside the parks boundaries to study the great mounds, visible along the West Shore Expressway, or from the edge-of-the-kills neighborhood that 30 years ago was a hellscape: hordes of vermin and putrid smells that I heard a resident once describe as akin to having your head in a garbage can. Fresh Killsa monumental 2,200-acre site on Staten Islandwas once the world's largest landfill. Understanding the former landfills health effects will remain relevant, experts said, because the city plans to transform Fresh Kills into Freshkills, a sprawling park that it expects to fully open in 2036. When fully . Ill think of the migrating birds who see Freshkills and all of Staten Islands parks as a life-sustaining stop on the way through the region, up through the Meadowlands and into Long Island Sound and beyond. Hirsh, atop a hill with hundreds of acres of land at her heels, points across the water at the Manhattan skyline. Staten Islands plight isnt uncommon, Brawley, who was the chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society from 2007 to 2018, said. Identifying so-called cancer clusters is notoriously difficult because proving their existence requires tremendous resources, several experts told CNN. Garbage is deposited by heavy equipment at the Fresh Kills Land Fill, formerly the largest garbage dump in the world, now closed. CNN Sans & 2016 Cable News Network. The goal is to create a space where people can engage and enjoy the scenery but also learn about the impact everyday waste has. This cap is between three and, in some places, 12 feet deep. [26] It will consist of a variety of public spaces and facilities for a multitude of activity types. All photographs accompanying this article are from an ongoing series documenting the rebirth of Freshkills. The lower Manhattan skyline is visible from Freshkills Park. Debris from the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, whose twin towers once stood just across the harbor, is buried on site. Barasch, who represented Zadroga, said Staten Island residents are receiving similar treatment from the city. This is the third study weve conducted in the last 25 years looking at cancer patterns that might be associated with living near Fresh Kills, and our findings do not suggest that potential exposures from the former landfill have contributed to elevated cancer rates in the surrounding communities, he said. [25] With an eventual size of 2,200 acres (890ha), Freshkills Park will be three times the size of the 843-acre (341ha) Central Park. The bottom layer is consolidated garbage. The next creatures park planners are hoping to attract are humans, who have been locked out since these 2,200 acres of the islands west shore were first locked down for trash. The cancer rates have underscored decades-long tensions between Staten Island and the city of New York. The radical fix for a noxious landfill in Staten Island: Bury the trash, plant some grass and do nothing for 20 years. There were 300 people . Let them tell their stories.. Sleight Family Graveyard. While the report was an appropriate first step in dissecting the issue, Beate Ritz, a professor of epidemiology and environmental health at UCLA, said a deeper investigation would require interviewing Staten Island residents about their lifestyles, jobs, experiences living near the landfill and medical histories, all factors that can play a role in causing cancer. At this height, it would have been taller than Todt Hill making it the highest point on the East Coast south of Mount Desert Island in Maine. Through the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), the federal government allowed victims or workers who suffered a 9/11 injury or condition including dozens of cancers to file a claim for federal aid. They quickly grow and die, grow and die, creating a rich soil that something else can grow onto. It's going to cost something in the neighborhood of $5 million a year, and it's going to run somewhere between five and 10 years long, Brawley said. And we have to remember what it means that the hills growth stopped. The diggers were supplemented by other cranes (mostly mounted on barges). He wanted the area to be developed as Staten Island's industrial base, as it was opposite the Arthur Kill from the heavy industry of New Jersey. An art gallery popped up in 2018. "This place is -- has an appeal for kind of an urban adventure. Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill | CNN The trash would be capped with plastic, then slowly covered with millions of tons of clean soils, the soils planted with native grasses. Next year, when I look out from the top of the North Mound, Ill be thinking about what the all-new grasslands and the restored marshes mean not just for the lucky-at-last Staten Island communities nearby but for the Mid-Atlantic coast. ", First published on January 12, 2018 / 4:16 PM. Holtermann's Bakery. Each section of the park gives visitors a glimpse at the extensive undertaking. The South Mound was capped in 1996, the North Mound the next year. Kidnapping of Louisiana mom foiled by gut instinct of off-duty sheriff's deputy, Kratom products draw criticism from health experts. Refuse was picked up by a crane (called a "digger") using a clamshell bucket and deposited in a caterpillar-tracked side-dump vehicle called an "Athey wagon" (not related to the equipment of the same name used for oil drilling). Corner told me at the time. Freshkills Park: the history of the former landfill-turned-green space A typical day would unload twelve barges (six at each plant). Residents recalled how the landfill stank, especially on warm days. David O. Carpenter, who ran the state health departments research center in the 1980s and now runs the State University of New York at Albanys Institute for Health and the Environment, said he thinks governments sometimes have incentives to minimize concerns about environmental exposures. A little less than two decades ago, the last steaming load of garbage arrived at Fresh Kills Landfill. A retrospective follow-up study, which would involve interviewing patients about past exposures, would be unrealistic, he said, because people move, the city was unable to identify exposures from the landfill that might be plausibly linked to the cancers of concern and because there is no way to quantify potential exposures from decades past.. This stuff travels for miles and miles and miles.. It was reachable from Victory Boulevard. Fresh Kills - Google Books From 1948 to 2001, it was the main receptacle for New York City's refuse. [17] After much deliberation, New York City was required to pay $1 million for past pollution damages as well as pay for the cleanup. Milestone reached for closed Fresh Kills Landfill; years of - silive Fresh Kills: The Making and Unmaking of a Wastescape - JSTOR They didnt do their job, Nelson said. The barge had set off that morning from a transfer station in College Point, Queens, heading south into the East River. New York comes clean: the controversial story of the Fresh Kills In 1993, almost two-thirds of Staten Islanders voted to secede from New York City. It estimates that as global urbanization accelerates and populations grow, the figure will rise to 2.2 billion tons by 2025. Cornelius Hall, when he was the city's public works commissioner, opposed the project, but when he became the Borough President of Staten Island, he surprised residents by backing the plan, saying: "I am firmly convinced that a limited landfill project can be undertaken at Fresh Kills, a project that would prove of great value to the island through the reclamation of valuable land from now worthless marshland. Fresh Kills, primed by years of local dumping, was ripe for further exploitation. [16] In 1950, the height was increased to 2540 feet (812m). What You Need To Know The Fresh Kills Landfill collected New York City trash from 1948 through 2001 Since 1986, the city has spent nearly $1 billion to close the landfill in sections On. I am going along with this proposal because I believe we are in a position to use this fill to our advantage, for the development of the West Shore of Staten Island, which is essential.". LoPalo said the lawyers denied claims of respirator shortages and pointed to other factors that could be causing illnesses, such as lifestyle, genetics and other occupational exposures. It felt like more of a duty than a burden.. The Fresh Kills site in its natural state was primarily tidal creeks and coastal marsh. This meant more solid waste for the city's eight landfills to handle. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, is transforming what was the world's largest landfill. After the 9/11. [21], Thousands of detectives and forensic evidence specialists worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills Landfill to try to recover remnants of the people killed in the attacks. Dr. Maaike van Gerwen, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at Mount Sinai, said this is a plausible explanation for the increase in thyroid cancer rates, especially because, according to the states report, nearly all the increase in Staten Island thyroid cancer has been for small tumors that cause no symptoms. The midnight to 8 am shift was for maintenance. Above that is a layer of intermediate soil cover. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. These layers work to mitigate contamination, ensure safe collection of released gas as garbage decomposes and ultimately provide a safe, habitable and scenic space. I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills, like Jamaica Bay, had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. The result was the closing of nine of the city's incinerators and a sharp reduction in the combustion of waste by 1944. To ask me about my cancer nothing. Today, there are four giant trash hills, though you see just the hills, no trash. Fresh Kills which gets its name from kille, an archaic Dutch word for riverbeds or waterways was on voters minds even then. Destroyed cars and trucks sit at the Fresh Kills landfill January 14, 2002 in the Staten Island borough of New York City. Its just not that easy scientifically to be able to link an exposure as broad as a landfill to these cancers.. In 2002, a UK study concluded that its research did not support suggestions of excess risks of cancer associated with landfill sites.. The area was declared a wild bird sanctuary, and some hawks, falcons, and owls were brought in. The closure of Fresh Kills Landfill marks a significant shift in land-use for Staten Island - from a past condition with over 40% of land designated as industrial or vacant, to a future scenario where over 75% of the land area will comprise nature, recreation and residential programs, with over 40% designated as open space. City officials have pointed to several other factors, such as smoking and overscreening, as potential causes for the higher cancer rates. Fresh Kills opened in 1948. Sheila Birnbaum, who served as the 2011 funds special master, did not respond to requests for comment. Fresh Kills continued to operate until its closure in 2001. David Ozonoff, who chaired Boston Universitys environmental health department from 1977 to 2003, has written about how governments sometimes rely on the vagaries of cancer causes to steer public conversation away from environmental concerns. Attempts to suppress the population with poison failed. In the years after 9/11, some workers who were exposed to debris at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills began to wrestle with health problems. The response usually is to sort of make the problem go away by saying, it could be all sorts of stuff, Ozonoff, who has studied public health agencies response to waste site concerns in Massachusetts and upstate New York, said. [9] The landfill accepted its first scow in April 1948. By 1946, only ten incinerators were in operation, with capacity having declined by half since 1937. (They eat phragmites, a common reed that tends to take over.) While Landrigan and his team didnt collect samples from the landfill after 9/11, they did find toxic materials glass fibers, asbestos, lead and pesticides in air and dust samples taken from Ground Zero. Julie Herbstman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, was one of 15 advisers who provided feedback during the citys study process. Thats whats most wonderful about Freshkills; its a place to witness change, a giant viewing station for ecological adaptation. Today, Fresh Kills has been rebranded as Freshkills, and the park that is now at the site of the old dump is poised to accept visitors: the North Park will open in spring 2021, the rest by 2036. While studies have not shown that thyroid screening is directly harmful, health authorities, such as the US Preventative Service Task Force, have recommended against it for asymptomatic adults because it may lead to overdiagnosis and risky treatment of harmless tumors. The area became a popular spot for birdwatching. (Staten Island Advance . And in just twenty-five years, it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City's refuse.[9]. The city of New York turned the world's biggest landfill into an incredible bio-diverse green space that is able to methane-power homes, in a decades-long project. The native plant species were driven out by the common reed, a grass that grows abundantly in disturbed areas and can tolerate both fresh and brackish water. The site is large enough to support many sports . The tidal marsh, which helped to clean and oxygenate the water that passed through it, was destroyed by the dump. Previously, the city used other landfills and. The landfill it's being built upon was shut down in 2001 and the vast park is opening in phases, with its completion projected in 2036. On March 22, 2001, Fresh Kills Landfill received its last barge of residential solid waste. All along, park officials occasionally escorted groups of birders through the closed-off park-in-progress, as well as artists and school groups. [10] The plan was endorsed by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority chairman, Robert Moses. After that was closed too, the only landfill that would receive wastea big decision made by the city, because of its sizewas Fresh Kills in Staten Island. Its also less diverse; about 60% of Staten Islanders identify as White according to recent Census estimates, compared to 32% in the rest of the city. But how did this massive garbage heap become one of the city's most ambitious public projects? Operations during the 1960s were conducted in three locations named "Plant 1", "Plant 2", and "Brookfield Avenue." Fresh Kills Landfill - Staten Island, New York - Atlas Obscura The last barge of garbage arrives at the Fresh Kills landfill on March 22, 2001. Evocatively called " Fresh Kills " (from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning "stream"), the suburban landfill had served since 1948 as the primary disposal facility for New York City's solid. NYC Parks. Be conscious. Corner and his team were less artists than restoration biologists, jump-starting a framework and leaving the ecology of the site itself to finish things up. You take a very sterile or inert foundation and move something in. Planned attractions include playgrounds, athletic fields, horseback riding trails and a wildlife refuge. A memorial was built in 2011, which also honors those whose identities were not able to be determined from the debris. At the peak of its operation, in 1986, Fresh Kills received 29,000 short tons (26,000t) of residential waste per day, playing a key part in the New York City waste management system. "[13], One of the first steps taken was the dredging of the marsh to allow the passage of the city's garbage scows. The name comes from the landfill's location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island. CNN. A cancer cluster, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time., Accessible icon title "When you close a landfill there are two parts to it. One of the most apt examples of this global cooperation is the Freshkills' sister park in Israel, Ariel Sharon Park, created from the Hiriya landfill. President Donald Trump signed a bill last summer that will provide money for the VCF through 2090. [9], Staten Island Transfer Station occupies a small portion of the site of the former Fresh Kills Landfill near the old Plant #2 at 403449N 741138W / 40.580267N 74.193994W / 40.580267; -74.193994 (Staten Island Transfer Station). Shortly after that last barge arrived in 2001, the parks design contest, sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society, was complicated when debris from the World Trade Center disaster wound up in Fresh Kills, now buried in the West Mound. Tracey Morgan Gallery, in Ashville North Carolina, presented Jade Doskow: Freshkills, a new exhibition of photographs taken at Staten Island's Freshkills Park.The exhibit ran from September 21, 2021 through October 30, 2021. Even in a group, a visitor feels like an interloper in a quiet, faraway green space, dotted with glimpses of infrastructure: plastic sheeting, methane extraction pipes, concrete troughs to channel rainwater. The Fresh Kills Landfill was a landfill covering 2,200 acres (890ha) in the New York City borough of Staten Island in the United States. George E. Pataki. The voters of Staten Island, reliably conservative, rallied around Michael R. Bloomberg, who, down in the polls in his first term, promised to trade their dump for a park. [9], Staten Island residents and their representatives opposed the plan. As described in an inter-departmental report from 1946: "Because of the substantial sums involved in the preparation and acquisition of the [Fresh Kills] site, [in order to justify this expense] the City must dispose of refuse at this location for a number of years. The once notorious Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island is being developed into an urban park. Thats a clear source of revenue that should go back to Staten Islanders, Borelli said. It is almost unbelievable that New York City would set aside a parcel of land as big as Lower Manhattan south of 23rd Street and just let it go to seed. Assemblyman Edmund P. Radigan introduced a secession bill in the Legislature. New York's Fresh Kills Landfill Gets an Epic Facelift Use. But its unclear whether the VCFs eligibility zone extends to residents who lived near Fresh Kills. It is the largest human-engineered formation in the world. LoPalo recalled that the citys attorneys vigorously challenged each claim. [12] The talk of using Fresh Kills for only three years may have been a ploy to allow Hall to save face politically. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, is transforming what was the world's largest landfill. In 2017, Borelli called on leaders to conduct a study. When the fund was reauthorized in 2015, Congress wrote the Canal Street boundaries into the law. In this way, over the course of 20 years, the parks and sanitation departments worked together with Field Operations to restore or encourage tidal wetlands, to generate forests, scrublands, and the wide-open fields of grasses. Robert Sullivan is the author of numerous books, including Rats and The Meadowlands. He teaches at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. A2015 reportin the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that residents in the broader metropolitan area of New York throw away 33 million tons of trash per year. Is it the slight difference in ambient noise, which includes the sound of methane mitigation that always reminds me of the 1975 Joni Mitchell LP, The Hissing of Summer Lawns? The landfill opened in 1948 and, at its peak, absorbed as much as 29,000 tons of trash per day. Still surrounded by some of the original ecosystem, the landfill now contains four enormous mountains of refuse. All debris from World Trade. [4] It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet (30 to about 70m) and hold about 150million short tons (14010^6t) of solid waste. [24], In January 2005, Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro announced plans to open three roads leading out of the former landfill to regular traffic, as part of an effort to ease road congestion. By 1955, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, serving as the principal landfill for household garbage collected in New York City.[6]. The Transformation of Freshkills Park From Landfill to Landscape [9][20], After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Fresh Kills was temporarily reopened as a sorting ground for roughly a third of the rubble from Ground Zero. Original plans showed the dump with a twenty-year lifespan. Presently closed-down and slated to eventually become phased into a public park, Fresh Kills used to be the largest landfill in the world, the Puente Hills Landfill of Los Angeles County now currently being the largest functioning landfill in the country. (Staten Island Advance) Using his closeness with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Molinari moved to close the dump. By the time Fresh Kills closed in 2001, the large swath of the boroughs western shore was the only functioning municipal landfill within city limits, and contained household trash food waste, paper, clothes from across all five boroughs. 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. While cancer rates around the landfill were higher when compared to the rest of Staten Island, rates were only meaningfully elevated for five bladder, breast, kidney, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and thyroid cancer and the study found little evidence of an association between living close to the former Fresh Kills Landfill and cancer. At conception, it was not the cutting-edge expression of sustainability that it is seen as today. They found that between 1995 and 2015, adult residents of Staten Island suffered from certain cancers at slightly or moderately higher rates than residents in other boroughs. The draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was published for public review in May 2008. In 2011, the federal Zadroga Act reopened the VCF and authorized its new special master to designate new exposure zone boundaries. Fresh Kills is a section of Staten Island in New York which was used as a landfill between 1948 and 2001. The Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island was once the worlds largest dumping site, receiving around 30,000 tns of waste every day! Cities like New York generate a massive amount of municipal waste. Planning to Close Its Landfill, New York Will Export Trash Acres of wide-open grasslands are rare anywhere in the U.S. and unimaginable in a city overrun by development. A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. [7][19] Under local pressure from Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, and with the support of mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York state governor George Pataki,[9] and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the landfill site was finally closed on March 22, 2001, though it was temporarily reopened soon after for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan (see below). Had that fall not happened, I would not have known that (I had cancer).. Animals were also a problem. Not once. Construction on the actual park began in 2008. We have to see it too as a reminder of what the city consumes those mountains are made of our trash. [3] From 1991 until its closing it was the only landfill to accept New York City's residential waste. The department also operates a registry to track health data on 9/11 survivors. Blaming a communitys lifestyle, he wrote in 1987, is politically safer. Its effective because the explanation is highly plausible, Ozonoff said in an interview, and prevents cities and states from having to spend money on deeper investigation. A 1996 report and its addendum, in 2000, recommended further monitoring of the site. [6] It was estimated that, if kept open, the landfill would have eventually reached a height of 500 feet (150m) or more. [23], The Fresh Kills site is to be transformed into reclaimed wetlands, recreational facilities and landscaped public parkland, the most significant expansion of the New York City parks since the development of the chain of parks in the Bronx during the 1890s. Nelson, the woman who is being treated for breast cancer, said the report isnt enough. The . Mager said that while the department doesnt conduct air monitoring at Fresh Kills, the system that burns and purifies landfill gas is in compliance with emission requirements. Theyre absolutely within their rights to argue that this landfill has to be meticulously watched for years or even decades to come.. The Justice Department-administered fund covers those who were injured while living, working, visiting or attending school in lower Manhattan below Canal Street in the months following 9/11. Eloise Hirsh, administrator of Freshkills Park and president of the Freshkills Park Alliance, was tasked with transforming those hundreds of acres of compiled garbage into an enormous, activity-filled public space. They can point to the undeniable fact that there are toxic and cancer-causing materials in the landfill, Landrigan said. But what Hirsh hopes people take away from the park is a sense of responsibility when it come to managing our consumption and waste. [15][9] The landfill was planned to be structured in layers, with a layer of garbage covered by a layer of ash (the remains of burnable trash from the city's incinerators), another layer of garbage, and then a layer of dirt to contain the smell. Some of what would have gone to Fresh Kills is today incinerated in Newark, N.J., Niagara Falls and Chester, Pa., on the Philadelphia border, where 70 percent of residents are African-American. The. How New York Turned The World's Biggest Landfill Into - LADbible The bridge was finished long before the rest of the expressway and was used by workers to travel between the two plants. Eisler-Grynsztajn, who was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer in March 2019, said he was lucky to be diagnosed. It also has a significant history as the site of the Fresh Kills Landfill, which was the largest landfill in the world before closing in 2001. Fresh Kills: From Landfill to Park on Staten Island - YouTube