Group Members: Donald Fung, Connie Li, Kevin Cheng

This Sunday, we went on a bus/walking tour in Fresh Kills to see the ecology and habitats there. From the tour guide and other experts on Fresh Kills that were with us on the tour, we were able to learn about both the history and future of the community.

Fresh Kills started off as wetlands inhabited by the Lenape Tribe who hunted and fished in the region. In the 1600s, the Dutch were the first European to settle in Staten Island which was part of New Netherlands. Therefore, the Dutch were the ones who named Fresh Kills as well as many other regions in Staten Island and Fresh Kills literally means Fresh Waterway.

In 1947, the Fresh Kills Landfill opened in what used to be an agricultural area.  Although it was intended as a temporary landfill, Fresh Kills ended up turning into the largest landfill and the largest manmade structure in the world, surpassing the Great Wall of China.

In 2001, when the landfill was soon to be the highest point on the East Coast, the EPA pressured the site to close down. However, the site was still used as a sorting ground for around a third of the rubble after the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Now, Fresh Kills will be turned into a large park that will be three times the size of Central Park and bigger than Pelham Bay Park. The park will be opening in stages in the near future and will feature many recreational sites such as the New Springville Greenway Biking Trail, cross-country skiing, horseback riding, and soccer fields. The first part of the park to open will be a section in the north part that will go into the wetlands. The park will be focusing on being environmental friendly and will be using solar energy.

We also spoke to the tour guide about the communities near Fresh Kills which are Travis, Arden Heights, and New Springville. We plan to do more research on the demographics of those communities past and present.

Here are some of the pictures we took during the tour:

This is a playground designed based on the landscape of Fresh Kills.

These pictures show the remnants of the sanitation and landfill trucks that are still placed there today.

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These pictures show the remnants of the garbage factories that were located in Fresh Kills.

The first picture is a view of the community around Fresh Kills and the second picture is a view of the Greenbelt and the city skyline in the distance  (Sorry for the blurriness).

And there are many more pictures that we will be putting on the site!