“A big chunk of nature in the city, wild and strange”—James Corner’s description of Freshkills Park hits the mark on several fronts. Big chunk of nature? At almost four square miles (2,300 acres) in western Staten Island, Freshkills is roughly three times the size of Central Park and almost certainly the last large designed park that will be built in New York City. Wild? The vast tract is covered in profuse growth, mostly self-propagating, having been produced by seeds carried onto the site by wind or birds. And strange? Not as strange as it was when the site served for over half a century as the world’s largest landfill, but it remains an unusual scene, with its four steep mounds of collected waste that are capped and undergoing remediation.
It is hard to believe, when viewing Freshkills Park (the name derives from the Dutch Kille, or channel), and its vast grasslands, stands of trees, woodland edges, wetlands, and tidal creeks, that it is a mere 12 miles from the southern tip of Manhattan. One observer, the landscape architect Matt Urbanski, has described Freshkills as closer to a Midwestern prairie than to an east-coast green space. Certainly it is a park like no other. While Mark Murphy, administrator of Freshkills Park and president of the Freshkills Park Alliance, notes that it has been designated a large designed park—the first in over half a century in the city and the last one that will be built there—Corner considers his work at Freshkills as being “more like a farmer cultivating land than traditional landscape architecture.”
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