The Legacy of Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we'll wrap up today's show with the call-ins, specifically for those of you from Staten Island, on the question, if you are from Staten Island or ever lived on the island, how has the Fresh Kills Landfill contributed to your Staten Island identity? Call or text 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Again, if you're from Staten Island or ever lived there, how did the Fresh Kills Landfill contribute to your Staten Island identity? 212-433-WNYC, call or text.

Some of you know the reason we're asking this question today. This past weekend, Staten Islanders rejoiced as the first section of Freshkills Park opened to the public. Now, if you're not from Staten Island or familiar with the history of Fresh Kills, you might be thinking, "New park, nice, not a big deal," but it is a big deal in this case. This park sits on land that was once colloquially referred to as Mount Trashmore. It used to house every single bit of trash collected in the entirety of New York City.

Who among all of you in the other four boroughs never even knew that? This trash piled up so high it was visible from satellites in space. The area that was the Fresh Kills Landfill is now a stunning 21-acre park for residents of Staten Island primarily, or whoever wants to go there but primarily for the people who live there, like any local park. Those willing to hop on the ferry to get there to enjoy are encouraged to do so, and from what I hear, will be well rewarded. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Of course, you don't have to get there by ferry, that would mean you have to go through Manhattan. You can get there by car from anywhere else. 212-433-9692. If you're from Staten Island and Fresh Kills Landfill has contributed in any way to your Staten Island identity, 212-433-WNYC. Joining me now is someone who deeply understands the sentiment, Tom Wrobleski, senior opinion writer for Staten Island Live, who penned the piece, You'd want to secede too if you were buried under tons of garbage every day like Staten Island was. Tom, thanks for joining. Welcome back to WNYC.

Tom Wrobleski: Thank you very much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give us the origin story of the Fresh Kills Landfill? When did it first open and under what circumstances?

Tom Wrobleski: Well, it was around 1949, I think they first started dumping trash there. Staten Islanders are used to hearing this kind of story. It was only supposed to be temporary, it was only supposed to be a certain area, and it wasn't supposed to last very long. Of course, there were other landfills open in the city at the time. Ours kept expanding, as I'm sure the other ones across the city kept expanding.

Of course, it was kept in business by consent decrees. It was really not technically legal environmentally, especially in later decades when we had much more stringent air and water pollution laws in this country. By the '80s, it was the only landfill left in the city. The last one before us to close was Fountain Avenue in Brooklyn, off the Belt Parkway, which is also a park now. I believe that's Shirley Chisholm Park. At a certain point, we were the only ones getting tons and tons and tons of all the city's refuse every day.

Brian Lehrer: Before we even go through more of the history, I'm going to get a caller on right away because I think Lee on Staten Island remembers that very early time that you were just describing before it was even a landfill at all. Lee, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Lee: Yes, Brian, I do. Needless to say, I'm a senior citizen. When I was young, I used to go fishing with my father, and we'd stop at Fresh Kills to get guppies for bait. It was just what could have been a beautiful natural park the way the waterways were, a marshland. It was preserved. That's the Jamaica Bay preserve, but they didn't do it on Staten Island. Then I was telling your screener, I remember in the '90s when everything was set they're definite that the landfill was going to close, they had dates and everything. There was a petition circulating to keep the landfill open longer since it was the last one and a person ringing doorbells door to door.

This person rang my doorbell, and I asked him if he was from New York City. He said, "Yes." "What borough?" "Brooklyn." I said, "Do you realize what an insult this is to Staten Islanders, that you want us to keep our landfill open longer so you can get rid of your trash? If you really think it's that important, make a landfill in your own borough. We've had enough. We want it closed." Didn't get it. Went right over his head, totally tone-deaf. That's my identity as a Staten Islander with Fresh Kills and with everything else. The rest of the city just doesn't listen for the most part.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Beautifully articulated, Lee. Thank you very much. Tom, give us the history of why that happened, what Lee was just referring to, and you started to refer to it before. Why did it shift from just being the trash of Staten Island to harboring the entire city's waste?

Tom Wrobleski: Well, I think it became a reflection of lack of Staten Island's political power as the least populated borough, particularly before the Verrazano Bridge was opened in 1964. Even now, it's in that same position, a little more conservative voting even back then. I don't think they really had any fear of any so-called political reprisals, no matter what they did out here on Staten Island. I think it just became very convenient.

There was lots of open space. It was very undeveloped at the time. There's still lots of open space on Staten Island, in particular, compared to the other boroughs. I just think it was convenient. There were waterways where you could bring barges, you could bring trucks. They built highways out here just to make it easier in some respects for the trucks to get to the landfill on the South Shore of Staten Island before there was a large population on Staten Island.

I think this is all exacerbated, of course, by the Board of Estimate decision in the late 1980s that took away our equal vote on the Board of Estimate. The Board of Estimate was abolished, so that was another blow to our political power, what political power we managed to have with overwhelmingly Democratic administrations for the most part. I think it just became very convenient, and it was out of the way.

Nobody was seeing it except for Staten Islanders. Nobody was smelling it except if you drove through, and that's kind of the thing we all had relatives and friends saying, "Oh, I know when I'm on Staten Island because I drive on the West Shore Expressway and I smell the smell." That gives us that forgotten borough thing that we talk about all the time out here on Staten Island, and we became a punchline for other people off of Staten Island.

Brian Lehrer: Tom Wrobleski with us, senior opinion writer for-- SILive is the web address, but many of you, of course, know it as the Staten Island Advance. You can see his stuff online at SILive, as we talk about the opening of Freshkills Park, where there used to be the Fresh Kills Landfill. Joe on Staten Island wants to remember the landfill era. Joe, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Joe: Hi, Brian. Glad to be on the phone. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: I'm okay. How about you? What do you got?

Joe: Good. I am a longtime North Shore Staten Island resident. The toxicity of the smell of the dump basically landlocked me. I would not go to the West Shore, I would not go to the South Shore of Staten Island because I just couldn't stand the smell. Brian, it was truly nauseating at that point in the '80s and a little further on.

Brian Lehrer: Joe, thank you very much. That's a real thing, right, Tom? I never drove by there or was otherwise going by there at the time when I personally smelled it, but I know everybody talked about how that smell was a thing. Is it gone now?

Tom Wrobleski: Yes, the smell is gone once the landfill was closed, but it was truly a toxic, poisonous odor and for the people who lived down there, who couldn't enjoy their backyards for barbecues on hot days, who would get the smell coming in through their air conditioning. People going to the Staten Island Mall, which is very popular right across the street, you could see the mounds, the birds, the seagulls picking up the garbage.

Papers would fly out of the landfill. They would perch in trees and power lines in the whole area, particularly down Arden Avenue, which you come down, and you could see the mounds of trash. It was psychologically damaging for Staten Islanders. It was health-wise damaging for Staten Islanders. You never thought it would close. It was like our Berlin Wall kind of thing.

You never thought there would be a world without a dump, but it was done, and thanks in large part to the borough president, Guy Molinari, at the time. Actually, he had to sue the city, his ally Rudy Giuliani, to actually get it done. A lot of lawmakers on Staten Island had a piece of that victory as well.

Brian Lehrer: It was in the Giuliani era, the late '90s, that that decision was made to close Fresh Kills, right?

Tom Wrobleski: When we were at pretty much the peak of our whatever political power we've had in the last 100 years or plus that we've been involved with the other four boroughs in the city, that was-- we got minor league ballpark then, and yes, that was the biggest, greatest thing that was done. Then Mayor Bloomberg, who also had to rely on Staten Island votes to get elected and reelected, then decided that it would never close again.

We would always ask everybody, every time we had an editorial board meeting with Senator Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg, anybody big-time person from [unintelligible 00:10:55], we would put them on the record, "You're never going to reopen it, right? It's closed forever. Never going to do it again because it was reopened briefly after 9/11." They went through some of the 9/11 debris out there, and it's like, "You can't let that be the first foot in the door." We would always put people on record for that. That's how much it was a part of our psyche out here.

Brian Lehrer: Rodger on Staten Island with a question about another piece of the history. Rodger, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Rodger: Hello. I love your show, Brian. Thank you so much. I have a couple of questions. One, I've heard that when they were contemplating making an access directly to Staten Island from the city as opposed to from New Jersey or using ferries, Robert Moses was opposed to a tunnel. He wanted that bridge, and he justified it by saying, "You don't want all those garbage trucks going through that tunnel, do you?"

I also wanted to ask if there's any substance to the conspiracy theory that a mid-island cancer flume has any direct relationship to the landfill. I guess, finally, they did use the landfill for sifting through a lot of the rubble from 9/11, right? It was a gruesome identification process going on there too.

Brian Lehrer: Rodger, thank you. I guess the bridge he's referring to is the Verrazzano, right?

Tom Wrobleski: Well, when we talk about the bridge on Staten Island, there's only one bridge we're talking about and that's Verrazzano. The dump, the bridge, everybody knows what you mean if you grew up on Staten Island.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Moses?

Tom Wrobleski: I don't know this for a fact, but I had heard that-- I do not understand about the tunnel. I don't know. It could be true. I do not know, but one of the things that we've talked about out here is that the West Shore Expressway was built, yes, in part to help Staten Islanders but also in part to help the garbage trucks get to Fresh Kills because Fresh Kills was located right off of the Arden Avenue exit of the West Shore Expressway. Maybe he gave with one hand and took away with another. Robert Moses, his imprint on the city and particularly on Staten Island is still very large to this day.

Brian Lehrer: Did the landfill contribute to any documented cancer cluster on Staten Island?

Tom Wrobleski: I believe that there's been a lot of studies about that. I believe that there have been some direct connections to that, and there were other landfills on Staten Island as well that contributed to ill health here on Staten Island. I'm not sure it's as causal to be able to say that. It's like X and then Y. I'm not sure about that, but there has been plenty of anecdotal evidence if nothing else that it was a very, very unhealthy thing for people living around there to have to deal with, and breathing problems and other things as well.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Pat from Staten Island but now in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Pat, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Pat: Hello. My goodness. I'm a longtime Staten Islander, but I've been a very current Brian Lehrer fan, so glad to talk to you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You have what looks to me like a beautiful proposal for this park. Go for it.

Pat: I do. I was singing about it, and I thought back of what it's been through, that whole Fresh Kills area, and they have done a wonderful job. Now I think the park might be called Lemonade Park because they were served lemons for many, many years out there, all the trash from all over and including the 9/11 terrible--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, murders.

Pat: They've turned their lemons into lemonade. It sounds wonderful, and God bless Staten Island. I'm a 91-year-old, and I have wonderful, wonderful thoughts about Staten Island.

Brian Lehrer: Pat, thank you very much. Tom, we've got about a minute left. How about Lemonade Park for turning the lemons into lemonade or any other potential name, but I guess Freshkills Park is probably straightforward and good enough.

Tom Wrobleski: Well, that's good enough. They changed it from two words to one word, Freshkills, to delineate it from there. I think that's a fitting thing that now we have a much more positive outlook when we say those words.

Brian Lehrer: That's until you sell the naming rights to somebody and then it'll be some corporate-- I'm just kidding.

Tom Wrobleski: We can name it in honor of Mayor Bloomberg or Borough President Molinari if people wanted to name it. He's already got a ferry named after him though. I wouldn't want to overdo it.

Brian Lehrer: Tom Wrobleski, senior opinion writer for the Staten Island Advance or online at SILive. Tom, thanks a lot for coming on. Congratulations on the park.

Tom Wrobleski: Thank you for thinking of me, Brian. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our Daily Politics podcast. Our intern this term is Muskan Nagpal. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. We had Juliana Fonda at the audio control. Stay tuned for Alison.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.