These amenities will be opening next in Staten Island’s Freshkills Park

silive.com     February 4, 2024  By Paul Liotta | pliotta@siadvance.com 

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — From one of the world’s largest landfills to the city’s second largest park, the changes at Freshkills Park remain underway.

A spokesman for the city Parks Department said Thursday that the design process is currently underway for the complex’s South Park portion, and the city expects it to be complete in March.

That section of the massive 2,200-acre park will include two multi-purpose fields, trails, pedestrian connections to the Owl Hollow Soccer Fields, a parking lot, public restroom building and plaza.

The entire park isn’t expected to be open until 2036 and will span 2,200 acres making it the city’s second-largest park to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx.

NORTH PARK 

Freshkills Park has opened in phases with a focus on the park’s outermost areas so people can enjoy the new spaces as soon as possible. North Park officially opened in November with Mayor Eric Adams highlighting the transformation of what Staten Islanders called “the dump.” 

“Look at this space. Look how beautiful this place this space is and it just went unused. And we had to find ways of really not only the desire to do so, but the need to do so,” said Adams. “At one time, this became the largest landfill on the globe, filled with New Yorkers’ household garbage, and people became complacent and stated that there was nothing we can do – it was ugly, it was unsanitary, there was a terrible smell coming from here.”

Other portions of the park have also opened, including the Owl Hollow Soccer Fields in Arden Heights, Schmul Park in Travis, and the New Springville Greenway.

A host of other parts of the park are also in their planning stage, including its 482-acre East Park and a publicly-accessible road system that will offer access to different parts of the park along with connections to the West Shore Expressway and Richmond Avenue.

FROM LANDFILL TO PARK 

What will be 2,200 acres of park land were once part of what became the largest landfill in the world after its founding in 1948. It is now the largest landfill-to-park transformation project on Earth.

Since the landfill’s operational peak in 1986, the city has invested close to $1 billion to safely close the landfill for its transformation to parkland.

Part of that work included covering, or “capping,” the landfill with different layers of soil, and a variety of permeable fabrics and liners, according to the Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Those layers stabilize the underlying landfill, while providing a barrier between it and the park that prevents the release of gas into the atmosphere.

Atop that barrier, visitors can see little hint of the refuse that lies beneath their feet. Gleason said some of the work over the coming years will be monitoring the contents of the former landfill and ensuring the vegetation above continues to thrive.

FRESHKILLS HISTORY 

Elected officials long fought the site’s operation filing lawsuits and continuously advocating for the site’s closure, but a 1996 state law, along with the support of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki, started the end of garbage going to the site under the borough presidency of Guy Molinari.

The last barge of municipal waste came in March 2001, but the 9/11 terrorist attacks forced the landfill to temporarily resume its use.

During the 10–month recovery effort, rescue workers sifted through the 1.2 million tons of material that came from the World Trade Center site to Fresh Kills, and after all discernible remains had been removed, the city buried the rest on a 48-acre part of the property that is clearly marked today to prevent disturbance, according to the Parks Department. Today, the city’s trash is hauled to far away like places, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, as part of a 20-year city trash plan that passed in 2006. Over the next few years, city government will need to produce a new plan to deal with the city’s trash, but the days of the Fresh Kills Landfill are a thing of the past.