Fresh Kills Park
The Fresh Kills Park Project is focused on transforming the former Fresh Kills Landfill on the Arthur Kill waterfront of Staten Island into a new public park over the next 30 years.
At 2,200 acres - almost three times the size of Central Park - New York’s Fresh Kills Park will be one of the most ambitious public works projects in the world, combining state of the art ecological restoration techniques with extraordinary settings for recreation, public art, and facilities for many sports and programs that are unusual in the city. In fact, the stage is already set for this impressive site to become a park. While nearly forty-five percent of the site was once used for landfilling operations, the remainder of the site is currently composed of wetlands, open waterways, and unfilled lowland areas. The tops of the landfill mounds themselves offer spectacular vistas of the expansive site, as well as views of downtown Manhattan.
Parks and Roads: Why Mapping Is Important
While design work is progressing on the first park projects, Fresh Kills Landfill is not yet a park. For land to have the protections that come with park designation, it must be officially mapped as parkland through the City’s official Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP).
ULURP is a crucial step in ensuring that Fresh Kills will never be reopened or used for some other unwanted industrial use. It is a mandated public review process during which the public can comment and the Community Boards, Borough President, City Planning Commission, and City Council vote on the proposal.
However, the ULURP has been stalled before public review has even begun as work goes on to resolve the controversies surrounding the future roads. Because the mapping of the park as parkland and the road corridor as Public Place dedicated to roadway must happen at the same time, the delay in starting the public review process not only slows the development of the road system through the site, but it also postpones the mapping of the site as parkland.
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Download the Fresh Kills Roads Presentation – Engineering Analysis and Proposal(PDF, 13.7MB) Download the Fresh Kill ULURP Presentation – Mapping Proposal (PDF, 3.2MB)
Now Available: Fresh Kills Park Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement
On May 16, 2008, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation issued the Notice of Completion for the Fresh Kills Park Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement (DGEIS). Pursuant to state and local law, the DGEIS identifies any potential adverse environmental effects of proposed actions, assesses their significance, and proposes measures to eliminate or mitigate significant impacts.
The chapters of the DGEIS are available for download as individual PDF documents. Hard copies are also available at all Staten Island libraries and Community Boards.
A public hearing will be held on Thursday, September 4th at 7 p.m. at PS 58, located at 77 Marsh Avenue in Staten Island.
Written comments on the DGEIS may be submitted to: Joshua Laird, Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Natural Resources, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, The Arsenal, Central Park, 830 5th Avenue, Room 403, New York, NY 10065.
See the Fresh Kills Site
Although the site is not currently open to ongoing general public access, between the months of April and November, you can take a public bus tour led by the NYC Urban Park Rangers.Sign up for a Fresh Kills tour!