Fresh Kills is a neighborhood in the borough of Staten Island. This region is bounded by the communities of Travis, New Springville, and Arden Heights. This region was named and settled by the Dutch in the early 1600s, after the Dutch word kille, which means riverbed or water channel.
In 1947, Freshkills was commissioned by the city of New York’s Parks Commissioner Robert Moses to be a temporary landfill for to accommodate for a sudden influx in population of New York City after World War II.
However, it served as New York City’s landfill for over fifty years, until 2001 when it was finally closed down. Although the last barge of trash arrived on March 22nd, the landfill was used a medium to sort through about a third of the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
Future plans for this community include the conversion of the land that was once the Fresh Kills landfill into a massive self-sustaining 2200 acre park. Because the site is so large, the park is being developed from the outside in so that people living in the surrounding communities will be able to enjoy the park’s benefits sooner.
Construction on the actual park began in 2008. The park will be developed in three separate phases and will include a September 11 memorial on the West Park at the end of the development process. The entire project is expected to be completed over the course of three decades. As of today, the first phase of development in the South Park is near completion.
Read on to learn more about:
The Development and Future Prospects
