Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City 0231189494, 9780231189491

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MARTIN V. MELOSI

A HISTORY OF CONSUMING AND DISCARDING IN NEW YORK CITY

FRESH KILLS

MARTIN V. MELOSI

FRESH KILLS A HISTORY OF CONSUMING AND DISCARDING IN NEW YORK CITY

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Melosi, Martin V., 1947– author. Title: Fresh Kills : a history of consuming and discarding in New York City / Martin V. Melosi. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023877 (print) | LCCN 2019023878 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231189484 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231189491 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231548359 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sanitary landfill closures—New York (State)—New York. | Fresh Kills Landfill (New York, N.Y.) | Freshkills Park (New York, N.Y.) Classification: LCC TD788.4.N72 M45 2020 (print) | LCC TD788.4.N72 (ebook) | DDC 628.4/45640974726—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023877 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023878

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Digital composite. © Diane Cook and Fotosearch/Getty Images and Len Jenshel/Getty Images Cover design: Lisa Hamm

For Gianna and Angelina

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: The Dilemma of Consuming

1

PART I: THE BACKDROP 1. Island City 2. Wasting Away

15 38

PART II: STATEN ISLAND: BOROUGH OF LAST RESORT 3. The Quarantine

69

4. The Garbage War 87

PART III: SEEKING A DISPOSAL SINK 5. The Go-Away Society 6. One Best Way 145 7. Futile Protests

169

123

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PART IV: LIVING WITH AND SURVIVING THE LANDFILL 8. The Burning Question

199

9. The End of Isolation 232 10. An Environmental Turn

252

11. Fiscal Crisis and Disposal Dilemma 12. Fresh Kills at Midlife

303

13. Barge to Nowhere 328 14. A New Plan

350

PART V: THE ROAD TO CLOSURE 15. Secession

373

16. Closure 395 17. Now What?

422

PART VI: THE POST- CLOSURE ERA 18. 9/11 463 19. Regeneration

491

20. Crossroads 520 Conclusion 547 Notes

557

Index 759

275

PREFACE

T

he idea for this book began a more than ten years ago as a narrative history of the largest landfill (or one of the largest) that the world had ever seen—Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York. A 1991 op-ed piece in the local newspaper noted that Staten Islanders “live side by side with a landfill that’s larger than some cities.”1 My awareness of the site, however, goes back to the late 1970s. At that time I was doing research in New York City for a book project that ultimately became Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981). On the research trip I became acquainted with the work of the Department of Sanitation, which was responsible for the collection and disposal of refuse for the city. I mined what documents were available, and I met a few people associated with the department, including a former commissioner. I did not venture to Staten Island, nor did I visit the wastescape at the time. In Garbage in the Cities I briefly discussed Fresh Kills, mostly as a “gee whiz” example of a massive dumping ground for Gotham’s never-ending stream of solid waste. By the 1980s, landfills were becoming too expensive to build or facing increasing criticism as environmental failures. Yet Fresh Kills was going strong and remained a marvel of large-scale engineering for many more years, much to the frustration of most Staten Islanders. As the book made the academic and public rounds, I got to know many engineers, city officials, lawyers, and business leaders associated with the waste management field. Colleagues dubbed me the “garbage historian”—a moniker I was not very happy with. I soon came to respect and appreciate the variety of people in the solid waste field

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for the work they did, and I reveled in the small but growing field of urban environmental history (which included my good friend and mentor Joel Tarr) interested in city services and urban technology. I also had the opportunity to meet Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an imaginative artist, who celebrated the efforts of New York sanitation workers and provided trenchant commentary on the implications of consumption and waste in our society. On a personal note, I learned that my dad’s first cousin had been a sanitation worker for Sunset Scavenger Company in San Francisco, and in the 1990s my brother began working for Browning-Ferris, Inc., in Montana and Wisconsin, and later for Allied Waste in Utah, as a safety inspector. Although my scholarship on the urban environment and solid waste was equally fascinating and quirky to me, I soon came to realize the daunting challenge of confronting the waste issue as a vital health and environmental imperative. On a trip to Newark in 1983 to give a talk at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a colleague took me to the Meadowlands, where I got my first glimpse of a vast landfill site—not as big as Fresh Kills but nevertheless gigantic. In 1988, I chaired a small session at Hunter College in New York City, which pitted an incinerator executive against the famous environmentalist Barry Commoner. The session centered on reintroducing incineration in the Big Apple, and I marveled (and was stunned) at the verbal fireworks that ensued, especially from the unwavering Commoner. I was able to observe firsthand the intensity and divisiveness that differences over waste disposal could provoke. For the next ten years, I devoted most of my time to topics other than waste management, but I returned to it as part of my research for The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). The book dealt with solid waste, water, and wastewater services, and since I knew less about the latter two, most of my original research focused there. What brought me back to Fresh Kills was a phone call from the archeologist/ garbologist Bill Rathje in late 2001 or early 2002. Bill was engaged in work related to the September 11 disaster, especially the decision to transfer debris and human remains from the wreckage of the Twin Towers to Staten Island. He wanted to pick my brain about approaching the research, especially since I had recently conducted a major project for the National Park Service on the historical significance of the Fresno, California, Landfill (an amazing story for another day).2 After our conversation, I filed away what Bill had told me about Fresh Kills and its ties to September 11, briefly reflecting on this curious turn in the landfill’s history. Probably two or three years later, around the time that I was trying to decide on a future book project, I recalled my conversation with Bill Rathje. The idea of developing a book on Fresh Kills grew beyond a story of the building and

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closing of the site and its “gee whiz” image. I envisioned work along two parallel lines: First, my long-standing fascination with the massive landfill, its role in New York’s refuse-management history (and solid waste history in general), and its place in the changing physical landscape of Staten Island. Second, and more recent to my thinking, was the desire to explore Fresh Kill broadly in terms of the causes and effects not only as a site but as a symbol. This meant, among other things, trying to understand how rampant consumption of goods and services, especially since World War II, created entirely novel waste disposal problems. Taking some hints from the new field of critical discard studies,3 I also wanted to examine a little more deeply the social construction of waste and wasting in the United States, especially the value (or lack of value) that people place on material things. Such an exploration might help explain what kinds of disposal were acceptable and how people responded to such a massive facility as Fresh Kills. Of course, such exposure also would be shaped by perceptions based on the site’s nuisance characteristics and its potential health and environmental risk factors. A gem of an essay, “The Town Dump,” written by the novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, captures some of the imagery of landfills as social structures. Albeit somewhat romantically, Stegner provides a vivid portrayal of the importance of the town dump in Whitemud, Saskatchewan: “The place fascinated us, as it should have. For this was the kitchen midden of all the civilization we knew; it gave us the most tantalizing glimpses into our lives as well as into those of the neighbors. It gave us an aesthetic distance from which to know ourselves.” 4 My friend and colleague from Beijing, the philosophy professor Song Tian, told me that a landfill “is a space (land) that lost its dignity.” This is quite a contrast to Stegner, but such polarities make the study of Fresh Kills quite enticing. I also have gained unusually valuable insights from historical geography and landscape studies. There is no denying that “place” is very important. In the case of Fresh Kills Landfill, it is not simply that the facility was built but where it was built. Gulping up the Staten Island salt marsh to construct the landfill was itself an important aspect of rampant consumption and a change agent for the borough and greater New York City. Timing of construction is equally important, as every historian knows. I initially envisioned a timeline for the book extending from the opening of the landfill in 1948 through its closure in 2001, including its place in the story of September 11. I soon began to see that I needed to build a backstory about significant steps leading to Fresh Kills Landfill before 1948, emphasizing how disposal was treated before then and describing what Staten Island and its marshes were like in the late nineteenth century, before the borough was part of New York City’s consolidation. I also needed to extend my narrative past September 11 to include the drive to convert the

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landfill space into parkland, which gained momentum by late 2001. What I sought, therefore, was a way to incorporate the transience of time and space into my story, which ventured from landscape to wastescape to ecoscape (or parkscape). A narrative approach seemed the best way to track this long evolutionary path and to identify key markers along the way. The expanded timeline, the role of Fresh Kills as site and symbol, and New York’s disposal dilemma are in many ways uniquely local but also implicitly and broadly global.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

yping the acknowledgments (although I only can type with two fingers) is one of my favorite parts of writing a book. It signals the project coming to an end and also allows me to thank all of the people who made the project possible. My wife, Carolyn, comes first. She tolerated my frustrations and enthusiasms daily as I delved into my research and slogged away at writing. That is true love! I cannot thank Phil Papas (and his wife, Lori Weintrob) enough for their hospitality in guiding me through the experience of Staten Island and for Phil’s (and in some cases Lori’s) tireless efforts to read every page of this study with an eye to correcting my most egregious errors and typos in telling the story of the island, its people, and its notorious dump. Jonathan Soffer also read the whole manuscript with an excellent critical eye and alerted me to shortcomings and mischaracterizations about New York City politics, among other things. My dear friend Joel Tarr read several chapters, always exhorting me to edit carefully and be economical with my verbiage. Although I usually write way more than he ever thinks is necessary, I’m pleased he is at my shoulder trying to elevate the quality of what I try to accomplish. Ben Miller was a constant source of information and perspective on various topics, providing insights that only a participant in the story and a wellschooled author has at first hand. Cheryl Bontales gave me some wonderful material about her dad, Bill Criaris, who had been general superintendent at Fresh Kills. Other colleagues offered a range of services, including Ted Steinberg, who graciously allowed me to read a final draft of Gotham Unbound, and Steve Corey, who has unlimited knowledge of the New York refuse experience

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and provided me with pictures and documents. I also want to thank Richard Flanagan, Michael Gerrard, Joe Pratt, Julie Cohn, Daniel Gallacher, Adam Zalma, Melissa Zavala, Michael Miscione, Mark Simpson-Vos, Brandon Proia, Chaz Miller, Michael Rawson, Themis Chronopoulos, Carl Zimring, Jordan Howell, Robin Nagle, and Samantha McBride for their many kindnesses and critiques. Several interviewees were generous with their time and delivered some very useful leads. Included here are Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Norman Steisel, Brendan Sexton, Paul Casowitz, Philip Gleason, Robin Geller, Kurt Reike, George Pataki, Carrie Grassi, Eloise Hirsh, and Mariel Vallere. Ellen Schuble completed outstanding transcripts of many of the interviews. Several additional interviews were available through the Columbia Center for Oral History, the College of Staten Island Oral History Collection, and the Oral History Project of the DSNY/Freshkills Park. I only wish I had time to gather even more interviews. I was blessed with several first-rate graduate assistants who helped build my bibliography and carry out tireless—and often mind-numbing—research. I could not have completed this book without them. Lisa Ng and Faith D’Alessandro in the New York City area were indispensable, talented, and trustworthy. I could not be in more than one place at a time, so their efforts really maximized my research capabilities. Kevin Tang also contributed to my research in New York in his brief time with me, as did my amazing daughter Gina Melosi. In Houston, I received strong support—especially in constructing bibliographies—from Mao Da, Deanne Ashton, Alex LaRotta, and Lindsay Scovil. Mario Lopez was responsible for most of the outstanding maps in the book. No scholar can function without the help of archivists and librarians. I was lucky to get excellent support from the staffs of numerous depositories. I simply would not have been able to gather many of the necessary works I needed without the assistance of the outstanding Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Houston. On Staten Island I depended heavily on Faith D’Alessandro at several locations and also on Cara DeLatte, Pat Salmon, and Gabriella Leone at the Staten Island Museum; Jeff Coogan and others at the Archives and Special Collections of the College of Staten Island, CUNY; and staff at the Staten Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library’s St. George Library Center. (Phil Papas and Lori Weintrob also acquired material for me.) In Manhattan I used several collections, often with the help of Lisa Ng, foremost, materials at the Municipal Archives and New York City Hall Library of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, with thanks to the late Leonara A. Gidlund and to Christine Bruzzese. Douglas Dicarlo was very helpful with material from the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College. I also spent valuable time at Archives and Manuscripts of the New York Public Library and at the Columbia

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Center for Oral History at the Columbia University Libraries. Special thanks to Reference Services at the New York State Archives in Albany. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, early in the project. My professorship, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Professorship in History, and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at UH provided necessary funding for my research on this book. And I certainly would not have been able to deal with myriad logistics for the project without the steady hand of Wes Jackson at the Center for Public History. My editor at Columbia University Press, Bridget Flannery-McCoy, was the best editor I have worked with during my career (and that’s saying something, given the excellent editors I have encountered). Her detailed comments and superb critical sense made the manuscript far superior to my initial drafts. Since she left for a new position at Princeton University Press, I have been in the capable hands of Stephen Wesley and others on the Columbia University Press staff. The three outside reviewers that the press engaged to read the original manuscript also provided encouragement and very useful criticism and insight. I dedicate this book to my wonderful granddaughters, Gianna and Angelina, respectively eight years old and four years old at the time of its completion. They preserved my sanity during much of the research and all of the writing process. Their unconditional love sustains me every day.

FRESH KILLS

INTRODUCTION

THE DILEMMA OF CONSUMING

F

resh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City centers on the mundane yet profound problem of solid waste disposal in the modern metropolis.1 Waste from mass consumption was a serious dilemma for cities in the twentieth century—and into the twenty-first. This is true whether we are talking about fossil-fuel emissions and climate change or accumulating tons of refuse from discarded goods and not knowing what to do with them. Societies in both the developed and developing worlds have faced the challenge of pursuing economic growth and, at the same time, coping with the unwanted residue of material accumulation. The rise of Greater New York City and its decision to build Fresh Kills Landfill offer a supreme example of the dilemma of consuming in recent years. Fresh Kills was a consequence of mass consumption and the embodiment of massive waste. New York City’s story about disposal is told through the history of a monumental structure, the 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, which is one of the largest human-engineered formations in the world. It is located along the Fresh Kills Estuary in the northwestern part of Staten Island on what had been extensive salt marsh. The landfill was opened in 1948, but its story begins several decades before the consolidation of New York City (1898). Tracking the transformation of the site and the disposal practices in Gotham in the mid-tolate nineteenth century explains how Staten Island’s land uses changed well before the landfill was laid out and what other disposal technologies fell out of favor. The teeming boroughs making up the city first emptied their vast amounts of accumulated wastes into nearby watercourses, including the Atlantic Ocean,

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INTRODUCTION

and also onto land throughout the city. The municipal government also began experimenting with incinerators in 1885 and reduction plants in 1895. Eventually the city delivered its refuse to Staten Island (only a short scow trip from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx), which was neither as populous nor as economically productive as most of its neighbors. Refuse traveled from where many people lived and worked to where they did not (at least initially), making the landfill at Fresh Kills a justifiable destination for things no longer of value to the people living in the swelling metropolis. The landfill served as a primary disposal facility for Greater New York’s solid waste from 1948 to 2001. For Staten Islanders, the endless citywide creation and delivery of thousands of tons of garbage and trash each day was a curse, leaving its citizens to wonder why “the Dump” abutting their homes and neighborhoods had been designated a sacrifice zone. Fresh Kills reopened briefly in late 2001 through June 2002 to provide a receiving point for human remains and building rubble from the destroyed Twin Towers after the September 11 attack (and it opened up again after Hurricane Sandy in 2012). What had been a notorious disposal site of unwanted trash now also became a cemetery for the remains of many people who had lost their lives in the nation’s worst terrorist tragedy. Today the landfill is the heart of a mammoth reclamation project to construct an expansive parkland known as Freshkills Park, three times the size of Central Park. Using the history of Fresh Kills Landfill as a focal point, Fresh Kills tells the intersecting histories of New York City, Staten Island, and the challenges of waste management. The long timeline and attention to the landscape is crucial. Observers most often visualize Fresh Kills Landfill from the back end of its history, that is, from the gigantic mounds of smelly waste spreading all along Staten Island’s North Shore, or, more positively, as the raw material for a grand park. Such a vantage point gives a sense of inevitability to the state of the place. The pre- and posthistory of the landfill, however, suggests otherwise. The land upon which it was built was a salt marsh used for many generations by Lenape American Indians and European immigrants for growing salt hay and for hunting and fishing. About one hundred years before the landfill began, the city placed a quarantine station and a supporting medical complex on Staten Island to distance infected sailors and others from New York’s main population. During World War I, the city sited an unwanted waste disposal plant on the very spot where the landfill would be built several decades later. This backstory particularly highlights Staten Island’s long period of alienation and the sense of its citizenry that their borough was regularly being exploited by the core city and that their homes were valued differently than those on Manhattan and elsewhere in Greater New York. Over the years, much of New York City’s marshland had been transformed into “useful” or taxable land or into various dumps and landfills. On Staten Island, marshland

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destruction led to the creation of an enormous waste site. For those who despised it, Fresh Kills Landfill would always be “the Dump.” For those who viewed it as a necessary evil, it was a sanitary landfill. There was nothing ordained about Fresh Kills as a disposal facility, other than the city’s will to build it. Why it became so and how it evolved into something else is at the heart of this book. New York City’s hunt for an ultimate disposal option is the consequence of more than rational decision making. Timing, circumstance, options, impulse, and accident are the stuff of history. Sanitation has always been and will always be political, and politics as much as anything else led to Fresh Kills. The landfill also is a supreme example of the serious consequences of massive environmental transformation; it is an altered landscape and socialscape that affects not only Staten Island but the whole city—and beyond. Fresh Kills is also as much symbol as site. The space that the landfill occupies was transformed from an apparent marginal landscape of salt marsh into a wastescape and then into an ecoscape or reimagined park space. The landfill is a tangible reminder of how human habits and societal behaviors are caught between material wants and valueless remnants. Stepping back from its remarkable history, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles looked upon Fresh Kills as “a social sculpture,” a reflection of our material culture, our consumer practices, and our sense of value and worthlessness. Why should we care what a landfill—even a gigantic one like Fresh Kills— tells us about our history? Most obviously, consumption and waste are inextricably connected, but that relationship is much more complex and broadly significant than simple cause and effect. Consumption of goods rarely if ever results in nothing left over. Material goods generate residue, which must be reused in some form or disposed of in some way. Even in an era of greater environmental consciousness, the lion’s share of waste is discarded. In modern cities in particular, the individuals who discard feel no further responsibility for their waste, are usually not the ones who decide how and where to dispose of it, and ultimately relinquish all ownership of it. Historically, the dilemma of consumption (or consuming) needs to be understood as a triangular relationship among the consumption of goods, the creation of waste, and disposal (often meaning place). Recently, efforts to alter this relationship call for reducing consumption, putting responsibility on manufacturers to create products that do not have one-time use only, encouraging reuse and recycling, and more carefully monitoring disposal. So far, the aspirations for Zero Waste remain just that—aspirations. Putting Fresh Kills and New York’s disposal history at the heart of this book offers an important case study beyond the “gee whiz” value of the site. Production of massive quantities of waste, certainly from the nineteenth century onward, was linked to finding a workable disposal option. The meaning of “workable” constantly changed. Sometimes it simply implied “out of sight, out

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of mind.” Often it entailed inconveniencing or harming those unable to muster sufficient resistance against it. More recently it required (or was impelled) to consider potential environmental risks. For much of New York City’s history, major portions of the waste stream were merely stuff no longer wanted. “Clean fill” and construction rubble were used to create new land, some organic material might be reused as animal feed, and recycling efforts came and went— and came back. The immutable connections between consumption and waste took time to recognize, let alone address, especially the squandering of natural resources and the recognition that production processes affect what and how materials can either be reused or discarded. Fresh Kills is a dramatic example of consumption gone wild. But the landfill also sits at the third point in the triangular relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place). As a location for disposal, it created a political storm between the city proper and Staten Island; it raised the specter of social injustice for its border neighborhoods (despite the fact that they primarily were white); and it exposed environmental risks from methane gas, leachate, and other substances. If this book only told the story of Fresh Kills as a disposal site and as part of the chain of consumption, waste, and disposal, it would be useful but incomplete. The events that led to the creation of the landfill certainly inform our understanding about the massive problem of solid waste, the decision-making processes influencing disposal practices, and the environmental and social implications of creating a refuse sacrifice zone. But history is a temporal discipline, and it requires attention to temporal matters. The construction and use of Fresh Kills (1948–2001) is only a part of the story of those 2,200 acres of Staten Island. To appreciate the landfill’s place in the history of Staten Island and New York is, of course, to understand it in context. But each phase in the history of the site—from salt marsh to park—evokes powerful memories of what the site had been before the landfill, memories of the landfill itself (a nagging reality of vast discards left behind), and aspirations for a changing role for the space once it became a park. Fresh Kill’s history is cumulative, not episodic. Fresh Kills as a transient space and bundle of memories adds layers of significance to the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place). In any city or country, the generation of waste is a vast physical, social, and political occurrence with long-term implications. The book uses Fresh Kills to impress upon us the broad consequences of wasting and wastefulness but also to make clear that the landfill was not a static land use. Fresh Kills contains multitudes: narratives about seeking a waste sink, political rivalries, NIMBYism and social justice, pollution and toxic threats, land use and planning, terrorism and remembering, and restoration ecology and park building. The connection among consumption, waste, and place is essential to explain how

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materiality and its effects can help broaden our understanding of urban culture. A “waste history” of this kind exposes a different way to explore a city’s past, in this case New York City. Since the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place) is the centerpiece of Fresh Kills, it might be useful to explore these concepts a little further—for the sake of clarity, not abstraction.

CONSUMPTION As a 1999 study on consuming cultures rightly stated, “We consume to live; yet we also consume to do much more than just live.” It also argued that “consumption is one of the basic ways in which society is structured and organized, usually unequally, sometimes incredibly so.”2 Any generalization about consumption needs to take into account important disparities separating the rich and the poor throughout the history of the United States and elsewhere. The Industrial Revolution did a great deal to restructure our consuming culture and to promote urban growth. Until about the 1870s most Americans were not yet wide-ranging consumers; instead, they spent most of what they earned on food, clothing, and housing. By the late nineteenth century, however, a new consumer society was emerging in which the average person could aspire to—if not always achieve—upward mobility. Among the growing middle class, especially, the new consumerism was most obvious.3 Rising wages or farm income opened up the possibility for a larger number of Americans to acquire more material goods. By 1900, 65 percent the country’s population lived and worked in and around the industrial centers in the Northeast and Upper Midwest—the so-called Rust Belt—where factory and office jobs were most plentiful. The oft-repeated observation that a new middle class was rising at the time was borne out by the changing character of work. In the 1870s, 52 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture, 21 percent in manufacturing and mining, and 27 percent in other fields. By the 1890s, 41 percent worked in agriculture, 22 percent in production, and 37 percent in services. This pattern continued until the eve of World War II, when only 21 percent were farmers and service employees reached 54 percent.4 Industrial capitalism ramped up the mass production of goods and expedited mass consumption. Mass production through factory assembly lines increased worker productivity, made consumer goods affordable to many workers, and led to a consumer revolution. Into the twentieth century, increased consumerism was spurred by the new business of mass advertising. Economic growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was not a steady climb, and boom-and-bust cycles took their toll.5 Marxists and other

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critics of capitalism argued that consumption was “the stalking horse of capitalism,” which focused on profits rather than the social good and led to a variety of societal and environmental ills beyond the undulations of the marketplace.6 While such an assessment might give too big a role to consumerism in the overall impact of the capitalist system, consumption practices and patterns were related directly to a growing waste problem in the United States beginning in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like Europe, the United States in its industrial era was confronted with huge amounts of refuse, with two distinct dimensions. One was tethered to the physical distress caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and primitive methods of collection and disposal; the other was linked to the rising affluence of the middle class, an abundance of resources, and consumerism, which continued into America’s postindustrial era.7 In a period of mass production, structural changes in the consumer market encouraged acquisition of all kinds of goods. New factories produced massive amounts of primary materials, such as pig iron, steel, railroad freight cars, and cottonseed oil. But consumer goods (such as toothpaste, chewing gum, safety razors, and breakfast cereal) also became readily available to many people who until recently had had no access to them, and the practice of wearing homemade clothes was being challenged by ready-mades. The cheap cotton-clothing industry, for example, was a leader in promoting industrial capitalism, beginning in the early nineteenth century. New York City was the center of this industry. In 1860, it had 1,286 companies making or retailing clothing. Other cities, such as New Orleans (982 firms), Philadelphia (560), Cincinnati (345), and San Francisco (271), were clothing centers as well. Mass food production, such as meat from Chicago and flour from Minneapolis, changed eating habits. For those living at a distance from the new department stores and retail shops, the Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogues offered mail-order access to the new world of manufactured goods.8 The historian Susan Strasser notes, “Americans everywhere and of all classes began to eat, drink, clean with, wear, and sit on products made in factories.”9 Over time, the goods produced in American factories and imported from abroad would become more diverse and technically more intricate (such as automobiles, televisions, computers, and innumerable plastic products) and the discards more plentiful and complex. Consumer demand was propped up by frequent model and style changes, not only in cars and clothes but eventually in cell phones and other electronic products. “Planned obsolescence” of washers and driers, refrigerators, and dishwashers kept consumers coming back for more and newer products. As the United States moved from an industrial to a service economy in the mid-twentieth century, changes in consumer trends were not easy to keep up with. And at times, critics and reformers pushed back against buying sprees to question materialism, to assert the dangers of a “throwaway society,” or to assert “Small Is Beautiful.”10

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The home was not the only “consumption space.” New goods and services were becoming available at an array of major sites, such as restaurants, parks, festivals, sports arenas, art galleries, cultural centers, and, later, cinema complexes, shopping malls, and theme parks. Aside from offering social interaction, arts and culture, and just plain fun, such consumption spaces became important mechanisms for accessing more and different commodities.11 While the discards of the nineteenth century in the various consumption spaces were largely food wastes, wood and coal ash, rubbish, and horse manure, the more recent waste stream included a mix of hard-to-replace and recyclable materials—as well as a variety of toxic substances. Of all the current discards, paper, plastics, and aluminum have increased most rapidly. In addition, the collection of these wastes has been made more difficult not only by the volume and composition of discarded materials but also because of the large populations to be served and the greater territory that sanitation workers were required to cover. By World War I if not before, many Americans had come to view some goods as necessities, not luxuries. Aspiring for greater upward economic mobility and a desire to enhance one’s standard of living brought with it a demand for conveniences like indoor plumbing. At least by the end of World War II, an automobile and a modest house were the status symbols of the rising middle class. In 1920, only 26 percent of households owned a vehicle; by 2000, that number was 89 percent. Having electricity, running water, and multiple appliances was expected.12 American affluence was widely envied throughout the world, even though not everyone shared in the bounty, and poverty was far from ended in the United States. With affluence came the distinction of discarding more. In the early twenty-first century, the United States consumes about onethird of the world’s resources, producing 50 percent more solid waste per person than any other Western economy. Americans discard more than 1,600 pounds of refuse per person per year, or 4.5 pounds each day.13

WASTE Turning the discussion on its head: examining the waste stream is a good way to understand systems of production and consumption.14 After all, wasting is an inevitable part of life and an integral part of consuming. The urban planner Kevin Lynch stated, “Wasting pervades the living system. Organisms appropriate substance and energy, use what they need, and then expire or dispose of what they cannot use.”15 For humans, the process is a little more problematic, as the journalist Heather Rogers observed: “Consumption lies at the heart of American life and economic health, and intrinsic to consumption is garbage. Such high levels of waste are the product not of any natural law or strange primordial impulse but of history, of social forces.”16 Waste, also, is subject to

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moral judgment. The sociologist Gay Hawkins argued that “Waste makes us feel bad, its presence disgusts and horrifies us, it wrecks everything.” There is a tendency, therefore, to place blame on the disposed object and not on the one doing the disposing.17 Scholars and philosophers of all stripes have expended much energy on trying to explain exactly what waste is and if it has value—materially or symbolically. Garbage, trash, rubbish, offal, refuse, junk, debris, clutter, litter, rejectamenta: solid waste goes by many names. In the natural world, waste is simply part of the life cycle; it is a change of substance returned to the physical environment in a different form. In human civilization, waste has an entirely different role and connotation. While humans are not alone in waste making, they are the only species that passes judgment on it. Probably the best known of these thinkers is the British social scientist Michael Thompson, through his book Rubbish Theory, first published in 1979 (revised in 2017). Thompson believes that “we need a theory of people and stuff—particularly now that we are faced with seemingly intractable discard-generated problems such as climate change—and that . . . is precisely what rubbish theory gives us.”18 Thompson’s basic premise is that there are two cultural categories that are “socially imposed” on objects—the durable and the transient. The former (for example, antique urns) have “increasing value and infinite expected lifespans”; the latter (for example, milk cartons) have “decreasing value and finite expected lifespans.” The transient, however, has the possibility of rebounding into the durable category (an old postcard perhaps?). Included in “rubbish” is the item that falls neither into the durable or transient category but, rather than reaching zero value and zero expected life, usually “continues to exist in a timeless and valueless limbo where at some later date (if it has not by that time turned, or been made, into dust) it has the chance of being discovered . . . and successfully transferred to durability.” Thompson concludes that “in order to study the social control of value, we have to study rubbish.”19 For the purposes of Fresh Kills, Thompson’s conclusion that “the boundary between rubbish and nonrubbish is not fixed but moves in response to social pressures” highlights the difficulty of what disposal actually accomplishes.20 In its typical context, “to consume” gives the impression of finality, that is, completing the process of acquiring some material thing and using it up. In many cases, the lifespan of waste is longer than its useful phase. The sociologist John Scanlan is right when he states that “what we consume never really disappears.”21 Some societies, past and present, used many goods until they were worn out, but that is much less the case in industrial and postindustrial America, where worn-out items are discarded along with no-longer-desirable goods. Even food items rarely get wholly consumed.22 Society is faced with several, albeit not wholly satisfactory options in dealing with waste: ignore it, store it, sell it, give it away, break it down, combine it with something else, or reuse as

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much of it as possible. In Thompson’s view, and that of others, society assigns a value to waste (which sometimes changes), and that value dictates its disposal or reuse.23 For New York City, as with most other cities, the chief aim of refuse disposal for much of its history was unburdening the streets, alleyways, and vacant lands of piles of rubbish for the sake of mobility, safety, and health. The advent of the modern environmental movement shifted attention to resource recovery and recycling but did not appreciably change disposal practices for what might not be reused. Today New York City ships most of its refuse out of state to other people’s landfills and to other people’s incinerators, although efforts to recycle and reuse materials have increased. The debate over what we throw away and what we waste, nevertheless, goes on.

DISPOSAL/PLACE The third part of the consumption-waste-disposal (place) system as developed in this book speaks explicitly to the central role of landscape in understanding Fresh Kills. First, it suggests the importance of Fresh Kills Landfill as a disposal choice for the City of New York, and, second, it discusses how the 2,200-acre space shaped and shapes the history of Staten Island in particular (the evolution of landscape into wastescape into ecoscape). In broad terms, as the sociologist Kevin Hetherington points out, “Disposal . . . is not primarily about waste but about placing. It is as much a spatial as a temporal category.”24 Sites like Fresh Kills Landfill are spaces within spaces, trash footprints, and areas of waste displacement. Even as a landfill it faced constant change given the ceaseless need to deal not only with great volumes of refuse but also with a waste stream that frequently altered in composition and environmental impact. Landfills operate as long-term storage facilities but are also “consumption junctions” where the remnants of consuming merely reach a way station, not a final resting place. They are part of a provisional process because they frequently do not remain a landfill forever.25 The landfill is characterized as an infrastructure having a mediating role between nature and city in dealing with waste, but its permanence or impermanence as a land use is decided by a variety of objectives, desires, and aspirations for the space.26 Landfills like Fresh Kills also are archives of material and memories—collectively the accumulation of real and imagined pieces of, in this case, every borough.27 Some have treated landfills as “antilandscapes,” that is, material places that cannot sustain life, or places that have become “culturally sterile or metaphorically invisible.” But this may be true only if landfills are examined in a limited time span. Their place in the consumer-waste-disposal cycle is rarely permanent or unchanged, but their long-term significance can be linked to an altogether

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different identity.28 As the geographer Anna Storm states, “There are wounded landscapes that are difficult to heal. However, the physical scars are also part of the stories that are the fabric of heritage, and these landscapes of waste may reemerge as new landscapes of memory and community identity that are directed toward the future.”29 The site’s past also is a defining feature. In this case, Staten Island’s vast marshland existing before the landfill is central to understanding the borough’s environmental and human history and how that was changed by Fresh Kills Landfill. Landfills as disposal sites make it clear that place matters. Heather Rogers hits on a critical point: “There’s a reason landfills are tucked away on the edge of town, in otherwise un-traveled terrain, camouflaged by hydroseeded, neatly tiered slopes. If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions.”30 On Staten Island people asked difficult questions. Ultimately, the eyesore could no longer be overlooked by others in New York City. Its scale was impossible to ignore, which was much more dramatic than the dozens of other dumps and landfills that had populated Gotham over the years. But Rogers’s interpretation of a landfill’s location is only part of a bigger issue about landfills in the landscape. As a highly engineered space, it bears the mark of a building and design tradition that more than hints at the lengths that city leaders go to to dispose of the city’s waste.31 Landfills, incinerators, and reduction plants are elaborate and intricate capital-intensive technologies created to hide, destroy, or remake wastes, with little concern about how that waste came to be. They are marvelous inventions, but they were not developed to stem the tide of consumption; they are only reminders that the residuals from consumption need to be tolerated. In many ways, recovering value from landfills in particular required turning the wastescape into something else. As the landscape architect Mira Engler asserts, in turning it into a park and golf course, “the dump was redeemed, the repugnance covered, and the bad memory erased. . . . At times, taking a utilitarian approach, the land is assigned some recreation use to recover its value and add a sense of communal worth.”32 In the case of Fresh Kills, at least, the recovery value of constructing a park neither eliminated the memory of the landfill nor restored the marshland’s ecological integrity. The specters of 9/11 continued to haunt it as well. Fresh Kills as a landfill was one particular iteration for that particular piece of Staten Island real estate, but it hardly seemed so at the time. The dump would always be the Dump, but the site’s meaning and value would not so much change as be modified by the powerful forces of history represented by the Twin Tower disaster and the building of Freshkills Park. The landfill was never really an isolated space, hiding the discards of a great city. Its recognition grew out of its relationship not simply to Staten Island but to Greater New York and the surrounding area—and also to the world of waste and wastefulness. Staten Island paid

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the price for its location—as did, for example, neighborhoods near transfer stations—but eventually the forgotten borough could reap the benefit of the promised Freshkills Park. The story of Fresh Kills is about the dilemma of consuming, to be sure, but is its future linked more to the resurrection and preservation of a natural setting or to a human artifact encasing memories of generations of New Yorkers?

* * * The backstory of Staten Island, the building and closing of Fresh Kills Landfill, and the future of Freshkills Park are parts of a sweeping history that deals with the life of one dump, albeit a very large and important one, and its broader implications. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss New York City as an island city that was land poor but economically and demographically dynamic, where outlets for waste from mass consumption faced severe limits and the mounting piles of refuse created the city’s first major “garbage problem.” Chapters 3 through 6 address the backstory of New Yorkers, Staten Island, and Fresh Kills before the landfill. Chapter 3 provides a glimpse of early Staten Island and also the notorious “Quarantine War” in the 1850s, when locals burned down the quarantine station and adjacent buildings located on the island for fear of future epidemics of yellow fever. The event was a precursor to other mainland incursions on the “Forgotten Borough.” Chapter 4 relates the “Garbage War” before World War I, in which the building of a refuse plant—on the site where Fresh Kills Landfill would be constructed several decades later—set off a major controversy. Chapters 5 and 6 return to New York City’s struggles with disposal, especially the experiments with incineration and the turn toward landfills. Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of Fresh Kills Landfill, especially through the machinations of the “master builder” Robert Moses. Chapters 8 through 14 treat the history of Fresh Kills Landfill and New York City’s chronic battles over disposal. Chapter 15 discusses Staten Island’s rebellion through secession to protest its years as a sacrifice zone. Chapters 16 and 17 take on the decision to close the landfill and the debates over what to do next. Chapter 18 introduces the tragedy of September  11 and how it intertwined with the history of Fresh Kills. And chapters 19 and 20 transition to Freshkills Park and the Department of Sanitation’s efforts to change its disposal practices in a post–Fresh Kills world. As a whole, the book is more than a study of Fresh Kills, but the book’s story could not be told without it.

PART I

THE BACKDROP

CHAPTER 1

ISLAND CITY

Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.

S

o wrote Frances “Fanny” Trollope about Manhattan in 1827. While not typically laudatory of Americans (her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans offered a disparaging portrayal of the fledgling United States, and she said of Americans aside from her friends and her “friends friends,” “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions”), the snobbish author praised New York City for its promising economic future and its beauty, elevating it to the grandeur of an Old World icon.1 The comparison of Manhattan with Venice was apt; both cities’ physical settings offered opportunities but also limitations. There is no question that New York City was one of the world’s greatest ports in modern times, as Venice had been during its heyday. For decades, New York City was faced with a predicament shared with other great cities, in its case magnified because of its geography, scale, and the density and size of its population: the disposal of massive waste. The city’s extraordinary economic productivity and its voracious consumption of goods and services made Gotham the envy of the world. The same forces hindered it logistically, politically, and environmentally because of the quandary of what to do with its enormous amounts of discards.

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