Freshkills Turns Staten Island Infrastructure Into Parkland

Freshkills gives Staten Island a landscape story that feels very specific to the borough. The 2,200-acre park project sits on the former Fresh Kills Landfill, which closed in 2001. The park plan frames the work as a transformation from landfill into a sustainable park, with landfill infrastructure still essential to the design.

Freshkills is not simply open space being added to a borough. It is engineering, ecology, memory, and public access being layered over a difficult piece of city infrastructure.

For Staten Island, that makes the parkland feel both beautiful and complicated. Capped landfill hills, creek edges, habitat work, and planned public access all sit inside the same long recovery story.

That scale matters on the ground. A walk or overlook at Freshkills is partly about birds, grasses, and water, but it is also about noticing how much hidden engineering sits under an open landscape.

Freshkills is hopeful without pretending the past was simple. It shows how a borough known for carrying a heavy city burden can turn that ground toward ecology, views, paths, careful monitoring, and a different public future.