Exploring New York City’s Most Beautiful Toxic Waste Dump
July 19, 2020, Shirley Chisholm Park: It’s hard to believe that these four-hundred-and-seven acres used to be a toxic waste dump. Or rather, I guess it’s hard to believe that I’m watching rabbits nibble on wildflowers and native grasses in the middle of what used to be the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill.
A History of Violation
Shirley Chisholm Park is the end result of a nearly hundred-year legacy of the contest between environmental conservation, urban development, and political expediency. Prior to the 1930s, the park was mostly marshland and the open waters of Jamaica Bay, until in that year Robert Moses proposed the Belt Parkway and Shore Parkway in his ever-expanding empire of New York highways (the Belt is one of New York’s notorious transportation punching bags, recently earning the honorific of a meme showing a picture of the highway’s perennial construction, reading: “Be like the Belt Parkway. Never stop working on yourself, no matter how much it inconveniences others”).
In 1942,[1] the New York City Planning Commission and Board of Estimate approved a project to dump landfill on the site as part of the city’s post-World War II program, in order to create parkland on the site. Oddly enough, this in itself was pretty aligned with mainstream progressive thinking at the time. Wetlands were commonly viewed as wastelands — natural reservoirs for disease vectors and the source of unpleasant odors.
It can be hard to understand such views in the historical rearview, but it’s worth noting that the early twentieth century is hardly removed from the scars of cholera, malaria and yellow fever epidemics. The U.S.’s last yellow fever outbreak was in 1905, and the last cholera outbreak was in 1911. In fact, one of the CDC’s founding tasks in 1941 was the eradication of malaria as a major public health concern in the U.S. The National Malaria Eradication Program began in 1947, and the country was declared free of endemic malaria in 1949.
The Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill began to be filled in 1942, and the larger Fountain Avenue Landfill began operations around 1961. At its peak, the two sites accepted more than 8,000 tons of trash a day, accounting for nearly forty percent of the city’s refuse. Along with the trash, the remote nature of the landfills made them ideal for the city’s more illicit endeavors. For instance, when asked about the disappearance of some local gang member, Roy DeMeo, a member of the Gambino crime family, would often say, “I don’t know, did you look in Fountain Avenue?”
Any hope for the site’s transformation into a vibrant park was undercut by the indiscriminate dumping of waste oil and hazardous materials including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical frequently found in electrical equipment like transistors and capacitors. The resulting slurry led to the spread of respiratory disease among the residents of nearby Starrett City.
In 1972, the National Park Service established the Gateway National Recreation Area surrounding Jamaica Bay, and the two landfills were included in 1974. The Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill was capped in ’79, though it was still receiving between 1–2,000 tons of waste every day until it closed. The Fountain Avenue Landfill was capped in 1985.
In 1990, the landfills were declared a Superfund site, and in 1991 the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) assumed responsibility for the cleanup of the landfills. In 1995 Jamaica Bay residents, concerned about health implications of the runoff from the landfills, reached an agreement with the city for the dumps’ rehabilitation.
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection eventually agreed to allocate $235 million to the remediation of the site. fund the site’s remediation. The first tree seeds on the site were planted in the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill. More than 1.2 million cubic yards of fresh soil was spread across the landfill at a depth of up to four feet, and some 35,000 plantings and grassland species were placed in the soil. The adjacent Hendrix Creek was also cleaned up by the NYCDEP.
Revival
For years, I’d driven past the site when it was closed to the public. The park’s hills towered over the Belt Parkway for anyone en route to JFK airport to see. Behind its ominous gates, it was hard to look out of the cab window and see those hills as anything but a landfill, and a monument to the failures of greed, shortsightedness and expediency that it represented. Even though there were signs that stated the landfill was the future home of Shirley Chisholm Park, it was hard to imagine people actually going there. How could the same people who allowed the landfill to exist in the first place be trusted to ensure that the land is now safe for the public?
But when the warning signs and fencing was removed and the gates were opened in 2019, allowing visitors to finally set foot on the restored wetlands for the first time in decades, it was hard to contest the success of the project. In a nod to that very distrust, an article in Curbed about the park’s opening called the area “the city’s most beautiful park that used to be a toxic waste dump.”
Walking through the front gateway, visitors are greeted by a mural of the park’s namesake, a smiling Shirley Chisholm — the first black woman elected to congress, representing the district in which the park is situated — surrounded by the butterflies, flowers, and other flora and fauna that people would be likely to discover while hiking through the verdant hills.
A few days prior to writing this, we exited Moses’s ever-in-progress Belt at Exit 14 and drove past the Chisholm mural for the first time, and I was immediately torn between wanting to profess the beauty of the park in its own right, and wanting to acknowledge that we should never forget that this was once an environmental catastrophe.
If you didn’t know the history of this place, you would never know it just by looking at it. You’d walk along the trail, as we did, and you’d admire the yellow daisies and all of the other wildflowers exploding from the soil in the summer sun; you’d stop in your tracks to admire the brown rabbits with their white cotton tails, or the flocks of starlings darting between the tall grass and the sparse trees.
As we walked through the park and admired all it had to offer, clouds drifted overhead, heavy and grey at the base but fluffy and white higher up — the sort of clouds that looked like they could just as easily rain on you as pass directly over you. But rain they did, and the soft rains only heightened the experience, causing the release of that petrichor aroma, and adding a sleek sheen to the plants as the dust was washed off. The weather seemed to be conspiring with the wetland to prove just how beautiful these hills could be.
The park’s stewards seem to have made an intentional effort to acknowledge the area’s legacy. There are placards around the trail that explain some of the infrastructure that fortifies the hills. As we walked along the eastern side of the park, facing Jamaica Bay, I found a plaque affixed to some stones held together in a large block by chainlinks. The plaque briefly explained the park’s history, and then explained that the stone structure is a gabion wall, part of the park’s extensive stormwater management system designed to prevent erosion.
Down at the waterfront, a new pier had been constructed, and when we walked out, we saw that park rangers had set up a fishing education station, where visitors could grab a poll and cast a line for free, with access to the rangers and some pamphlets to help understand the local ecosystem, how to fish, and what they could and couldn’t do with what they caught. Along with the park’s multiple “bike libraries,” it became impossible to deny the amount of heart that went into the park’s design.
A Tale of Two Landfills
JULY 20 — The two landfills on which Shirley Chisholm Park was built comprise two separate peninsulas. You can ride a bike on the path between them, but by car the two sections are accessible by different exits on the belt.
When we got off at Exit 15, we crossed over a bridge and turned down an access road whose markings had all but completely faded. The dull grey of the pock-marked asphalt stood in stark contrast to the glossy black we’d seen on the new roads inside the other section of the park. It occurred to me that this was probably the original road that all those dump trucks and pick-ups must’ve used to deposit all of the waste that eventually made it into the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill.
But once again the road terminates at the entrance of the park, and all of that newness stands almost in opposition to what that old access road stands for. And to drive through it is to again feel like you are someplace that should not exist. You are someplace that should be a moldering mound of festering garbage. Even the seagulls rounding a thermal vent in the air overhead in the afternoon heat look as if they’re trying to figure out what happened to all of that delicious human waste that was once there for the taking.
This day was hot and muggy, and the overcast sky was just dense enough to diffuse the sun’s rays and make the hike feel like a march through pea soup. Trees are sparse, and what few saplings and young trees that can be found on these hills are either too far from the trail or too small to offer any shade.
As we made our way along the surprisingly unrelenting rise of Blue Heron Trail, I was surprised at the relative dearth of animal life as compared to our first day in the park. I suspect that in the heat of the day, any animal with any sense had elected to hide out in the brush until the evening came. Insects and pollinators abounded. Seagulls soared and sparrows darted in and out of the grass, but otherwise it was a welcome stillness.
The signs along the trail kept referring to something called a “sky bowl,” with a height of more than 104 feet, whatever the sky bowl was, it wasn’t visible until we had reached the crest of the hill, where we found a trail winding through the tall grasses, leading to a cobblestone entryway into what looked like a tree-lined amphitheater. There was a break on two points in the ring. One for entry and the other to allow for an enviable view of the bay — another welcome stillness.
I suppose all of that stillness was what allowed my mind to wander more directly to the nature of the land on which I was standing. I couldn’t help but wonder just how far into the past this ecological disaster had receded — or if that past was still leaking into the present. To that end, I kept thinking about these strange bunkers in the ground — concrete lined with steel doors — that I’d encountered on both peninsulas. They looked like the cellar doors you find on the streets of New York, but it’s strange to encounter a door like that in the middle of a field, like a tornado shelter left all alone after a tornado has blown away the house.
These doors had warning signs on them, which at a glance I just assumed said KEEP OUT, but when I read what they actually said, it only deepened my confusion: DANGER: CONFINED SPACE, ENTER BY PERMIT ONLY
I suspected that they might be some sort of access points for regulators and scientists to conduct various tests on the capped landfill, and it turned out I wasn’t all that far off. As we made our way to the end of Blue Heron Trail and back to the parking lot, I saw that the last of these access doors I encountered had another sign on it, conveniently explaining the surreal nature of the access doors. Apparently, according to the plaque, the park has “a constellation of underground pipes collecting the methane off gassing from the former landfill and directing the methane to the flares.” The door I was looking at was “one of over 400 gas wells located throughout the park.”
In that moment, I found myself thinking of the vast containment structure built around the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. The structure was aptly named “the sarcophagus,” and what it entombed was, is, and for hundreds of years shall remain very much alive.
There I stood, on top of another sarcophagus, entombing another zombie, still exhaling toxic gas — undead corpses of the Anthropocene.
Note: There is so much history to this site, as a political football, as a mafia dumping ground and as an ecological puzzle. I’d highly recommend this article from Sergey Kadinski’s Hidden Waters of New York City blog if you feel like delving further down this rabbit hole.
[1] Much of the general history here refers to the Wikipedia article on Shirley Chisholm Park, with verification via the sources cited in that article and my own independent references, linked where appropriate.
