Just Think, Were It Not For This Very Large Landfill, This Area Might Be Ruined

The Parks Department has begun tours of the Fresh Kills landfill site, which will soon become one of the city’s largest parks:

The tour bus crawled up the winding gravel road in low gear. On both sides, the views stretched through the drizzle toward infinity, green, green, as far as the eye could see. A light blanket of fog enhanced the sense of splendid isolation.

Two hawks swooped low over a hillside; just beyond the border of the road, a fat, bejeweled ring-necked pheasant strutted in the wet grass. One of the passengers, Charles Fallon, piped up from the back seat, “This would be an excellent place for meadowlarks.”

This excellent place was Fresh Kills on Staten Island, former site of the city garbage dump, future site of the city’s largest park. Currently, the place is pretty much empty, which is what drew about 20 tourists yesterday morning to the Parks Department’s first public tour of the 2,200-acre parcel.

“I wanted to see the before and after,” said Ann Pisano, 67, who grew up five miles from the dump, the smell of rotting trash never far from her nostrils.

. . .

The bus stopped and the tourists fanned out along the hilltop and gazed across fields of grass and mugwort, chicory and fleabane flowers. To the southeast lay one of several dense housing developments that have been built near the landfill, but in most directions the view was something like a landscape painting of the French countryside, with a few methane-burning stacks and office trailers standing in for stone farmhouses.

“It’s a lot better than I thought,” said another native islander, James Lonano. “It almost looks like a parkland already.”

There were a few out-of-towners on the bus. Ms. Pisano brought along two of her grandchildren, visiting from State College, Pa. They looked miserable. There was also a three-man crew from Omaha making a documentary about waste. The 23-year-old auteur, Henry Phelps, traveled cross-country for three months this spring, carrying every bit of garbage he generated in a clear plastic bag on his back. He seemed a little disappointed by the absence of visible trash.

Then again, you can always look on the bright side of things:

As the bus headed back toward civilization, Ms. Pisano wondered what the area would have looked like if the dump had never existed. “All this would be homes now,” she said. “It’s a good thing.”