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Environment
Fresh Kills Plans Unveiled
(newyork.construction.com,
July 2006 issue)
Municipal leaders are planning to transform
Staten Island's notorious Fresh Kills Landfill, one of the
world's largest dump sites, into New York City's second-largest
park after the 2,700-acre Pelham Bay Park.
The New York City Department of
City Planning this spring released a draft master plan by
Field Operations, a New York-based landscape architect, which
won a 2002 competition to design the Fresh Kills park.
Stretched over a 25-year period, the
plans call for remediation of the 1,000-acre landfill and
creation of 2,200-acre park, approximately 2.5 times larger
than Manhattan's Central Park. The site will have open vistas,
woodlands, creeks, and wetlands. Its topography will take
advantage of the landfill mounds.
The park will also sport kayaking waterways,
an Olympic-level mountain biking trail, more than 40 mi. of
paths and hiking trails, and more than 1,700 acres of parkland.
Construction of the first phase is scheduled for early 2008,
with some recreational facilities and a park drive set for
completion by 2009.
For decades, Fresh Kills had taken in
most of the city's waste, but in 2001, former Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani fulfilled a promise to close the facility. It reopened
briefly later that year for debris from the Sept. 11, 2001
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The total cost for closing the landfill,
as well as "post-closing" steps and other corrective
measures, will top $1.4 billion over 30 years, according to
testimony that John Doherty, commissioner of the city's Department
of Sanitation, gave to the City Council in May.
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