Adventures of Urban Life

Katherine Pimentel
Freshkills Park

Freshkills started off as untouched land with natural water and then due to human activity became a large garbage dump. Now it is coming full circle again and going back to the way it was before or possibly even better. Over the past decade Americans have become increasingly worried about the ecosystem and the state of the earth in general. We have taken the earth and natural land for granted and now that we see the repercussions of our actions we hope that it is not to late to make a change. Such is the case with Freshkills, an enormous and expensive project is taking place in Staten Island to transform the huge landfill into a fully functioning park for humans and wildlife.
According to New York Magazine’s article Wall-E Park the architect of the park Corner, has a unique vision for Freshkills “The most complicated part of the design is the idea that it is designed to change. Large parks will always exceed singular narratives,” Corner wrote in a recent essay. “They are larger than the designer’s will for authorship. He added, The trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and ‘give’ to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time”(qtd by Corner, 7). The park should be able to be useful so that we do not have a large park sitting there that no one wants to use or care to maintain it because then that would be just as bad as the dump that it was. It needs to be able to change with the needs of the time just like it was able to change now that going green is so important.
When I visited the park I was impressed at all of the work that was done. The park looked so clean and picturesque that one would never think there were mounds with tons of garbage beneath those green hills. According to the tour guide there would be plenty of activities do at the park such as kayaking which I think is great because we do not get much of that in a city where much off the large land is used for development. I also like that much attention is being given to make sure that the park is as safe as can be and only the best materials and soils are being used. It is also good to know that the city is able to make money off of the natural gas that the land excretes which shows that the park is able to “give back” in more ways than I thought. The tour of Freshkills was an educational experience and I am curious to see the final product a few years from now.