Bringing Back a Fresh Kill

Staten Island

Manhattan

Fresh Kills

Brooklyn

Queens

78 > places > fresh kills 79

Bringing Back a Fresh Kill;Notes on a Dream of Territorial ResuscitationJohn May (millionsofmovingparts)

In April 2001 I traveled to Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island, to view for myself a scene that, up to that time, I had only read about in back-page articles and fringe trade jour-nals. Just a few weeks earlier, on March 22nd, Fresh Kills had received its last load of New York City’s trash, and after years of politicking, Fresh Kills was finally closing—a process with no projected completion date, only a firm belief that completion was indeed possible. This seemed to mark the end of something. It was accompanied by festive moods and photo-ops, smiling bureaucrats, triumphalism, three cheers, all around. There was no acknowledgment of the terrible environmental legacy the landfill had left, nor of the absurd uncertainty that surrounded its future. Only blind faith in a picture of rescued nature that had been draped both across its unholy terrain and over our col-lective consciousness.

Prior to my visit, Fresh Kills had become for me a kind of personal memory, one whose veracity, though imagined, seemed ever more reasonable as my preliminary research mounted. Hav-ing relied almost exclusively on print sources, I now sought to stake visual claim to a place that my mind knew only through description and suggestion, its imagery uncertain, built-up through cumulative hints. I have since labored in vain to decide which of the two images is more fantastical, more suited to hyperbole: my preconception of Fresh Kills, fabricated from within the blurry haze of research notes and shoddy newsprint photos, or the raped landscape I encountered that spring day.

> see also> p.102 > interview with john may> web > www.freshkillsparknyc.com

Landfill areasFresh Kills limits

> Fresh Kills Landfill is located on an estuary in the southern end of Staten Island, and was, at one time, receiving nearly 90 percent of all the solid waste generated in New York City—with estimates as high as 13,000 tons per day.


Increasingly, as happens with history, the two places are fused in my mind, existing only as shadows right now or as dreams I can’t fully remember in a morning’s half-sleep. Nightmares that I have willed away, or rich fantasies of control and comfort. The line of distinction is rapid and blurred. I’m no longer able to remember with any accuracy their outlines, where one image begins and the other ends, and so I’m left to recount what I can recall, unsure from which well my thoughts are drawn.

I remember men and women in plastic jumpsuits, zippered and Velcroed, moonboots yellow against the topsoil. Each was feel-ing around, trying to understand, trying to imagine what kind of landscape this might become. Each trying to see clearly through the rising waves of methane off-gassing. Each a white figure, pass-ing through an oil painting of nature, wandering through a mem-ory of natural things still to come, a nature not quite ready to be breathed in, lived on, or felt, an Unsafe Nature. Each worked qui-etly, in solitude, just hoping to make trash look like a nice place for life. People walking, dreaming about living in a landscape that might be livable, that they desperately needed to believe is livable–projective terraforming in the mind’s eye. An urban land-scape with no architecture, yet. This was (or so it seemed) normal and expected, necessary and justified. The strange commingling of persistence and indifference indicated a sort of morality at work, which, though familiar, resisted immediate description.

Concentrate: block out the noise of 400-ton cranes and mam-moth earthmovers. Squint: ignore the periscopic methane meters, infinitely splayed out with mathematical precision across the new fields, endlessly registering the toxicity and capacity of an under-ground world of pipes and transfer stations that, it’s hoped, will save us from ourselves. This is a technology of salvation. Maybe it will redeem us, cleanse us of our sins. More likely it will continue to kill, knowing that death sustains our extravagance.

Fresh Kills was invented by New York City Parks Commis-sioner Robert Moses, who envisioned using garbage as a founda-tion under the approach system for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (which he planned to build between Staten Island and Brooklyn), as well as a platform for new suburban development. In a 1951 report to the Mayor, Moses argued that Fresh Kills Landfill rep-

resented “not merely a means of disposing of the city’s refuse in an efficient, sanitary and unobjectionable manner pending the building of incinerators.” For Moses the landfill was “the great-est single opportunity for community planning in this City.” The original plans for the site—a swampy lowland of intertidal marshes and streams—called for garbage to be dumped there for just five years. Fresh Kills, in other words, would be a disposable commodity itself. But as the rest of New York developed and grew, landfills in the city’s four other boroughs began closing. By the mid-1980’s, Fresh Kills was the city’s sole option, and what kept it going then was pure inertia. Official rhetoric (such as that of the New York City Sanitation Department) maintains that Fresh Kills is, and always has been, a thoroughly planned venture. They point to satellite imaging and engineering records, arguing that the situation has been “closely monitored.” A quick glance beneath this language reveals that the official city organs have been in a reactive stance from the beginning. Fresh Kills is, in fact, a 53-year chain reaction. It became a 3000-acre topog-raphy of trash without anyone ever quite intending it.

The story of the birth and death and imagined rebirth-ing (currently underway) of this Great American Trash Heap is firmly inscribed within the body of post-WWII Americana. It mirrors and mimics the ascension of America to a position of dangerous isolation in the world. Parts of this story have been told, but warrant repeating amidst the exuberance that continues to prop up one of the grandest and most uncertain experiments yet undertaken in landscape urbanism. Fresh Kills contains within its trashy slopes the very substance of our contemporary morality—viz., a set of unquestioned collective beliefs that have attained the status of truth—defined by the appearance, during the latter-half of the twentieth century, of three now-recognizable sentiments: a devout belief, against all evidence, that freedom and accumulation are complimentary goals; the recognition that images are commodities; and an unquestioned embrace of a set of hopeful and reactive techno-logical responses, designed to prevent massive accidents that have already happened.


From Fordism to Flexibile Accumulation

Prior to 1971, the post-World War II American economy was dominated by a complimentary relationship between Ford-ism and Keynesianism. Fordism was a well-entrenched indus-trial business structure before 1941, and the high-output war economy only served to strengthen collective belief in its efficacy and propriety. The introduction of Keynesian market regula-tory practices during and after the war did not directly alter the internal structure of the American Fordist economy, but instead merely softened the external setting. At the Bretton Woods conferences in July, 1944, the major western powers, of which America was by far the dominant member, agreed to regulate the then-unstable world market by pegging all currencies to the dollar, which itself was to be fixed to a gold standard of $35 an ounce.

Following the Bretton Woods rounds, American Fordist cor-porations were able to extend their global reach with the signifi-cant aid of two external developments. The specific structure of the Marshall Plan ensured that the reconstruction of Europe was underwritten by U.S. banks, and not by wealthy Europeans, creating a debt association favorable to U.S. interests. Coupled with this debt structure, the formation of NATO (and other sec-ondary military alliances) positioned the American military at strategic points across the globe, placing the U.S. military-indus-trial complex in close proximity to key raw materials through-out the world (most notably, of course, oil). Domination of these sectors created “favorable terms of trade” for U.S. industry, and the extension of American military might also served to lower the risk on expected returns from overseas investment for indus-trial, financial, and service corporations.

Direct foreign investment remained the cutting edge, climb-ing from a cumulative total of $12 billion in 1950 to nearly $76 billion in 1970. In the post-war period it accounted for 70 per-cent of all long-term U.S. capital exports. Profits derived from these investments must also be considered in any cost-benefit analysis of U.S. military spending abroad. In the early 1950’s foreign operations supplied 7 to 11 percent of total after-tax corporate profits; this proportion then rose steadily, averag-ing 13 percent in the 1960’s and 21 percent in the 1970’s. For

the financial sector, the foreign link was just as significant. By 1970, from 26 to 46 percent of all deposits of the eight biggest New York banks lay outside U.S. borders.1

For a period following the war, the world of goods still corresponded to the Fordist production model; the value of an object was still primarily located right where Ricardo and Marx (and Locke before them) had found it—in the labor time required to produce it. The correlation between final products and the labor theory of value signified, during this period, that capitalism had yet to eclipse the model given it by political econ-omists of the nineteenth century. Policies and labor practices had changed, but the mode of production had only upgraded its technical ability to generate more goods more cheaply.

1 Richard B. Duboff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (London: M.E. Sharp, Inc., 1989), 154.

Fiber optic communication networkFiber optic panel cabinet (cross section)

digitalexchange

The end of American post-war market euphoria was discern-ible in corporate and government responses to a series of condi-tions whose relative magnitudes of influence on one another is unknowable. Identifying the exact chain of causality that led to stagflation is impossible, but we can point to identifiable rup-tures: American corporate profits declined in the mid-1960’s; there were shocks in various supply chains during the 1970’s; the Vietnam war was an increasingly costly venture, and social activism did decline. In response, in the summer of 1971, fac-ing a declining economy and rising war costs, Richard Nixon “closed the gold window” by rescinding the gold standard. No longer fixed to a weighted measure of gold, the dollar, and mon-etary exchange along with it, no longer necessarily corresponded

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to material production. All major currencies instantaneously floated, weightlessly, in correspondences of pure relation, signs of power and opinion, signifiers of geopolitics, subject to volatile imagery and “irrational exuberance.”

Capital no longer corresponds to the order of political

economy; it uses political economy as a simulation model. The whole apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger machinery of the structural law of value, and thus connects with the third order of simulation. Hence, in a way, political economy is assured a kind of second life, in the framework of an apparatus where it loses all self-determina-tion, but where it retains its efficacy as a referential of simula-tion. The same goes for the previous apparatus of the natural law of value, which has been taken up as an imaginary referen-tial (“Nature”) by the system of political economy and the law of the commodity.2

Nixon’s fissure didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its significance was

multiplied by other events, other conditions, mental structures, and corresponding technical developments. Fordist production itself was experiencing turbulence. By the sharp recession of 1973 technological development began to overwhelm the static rigidity of Fordist production in several key sectors of the U.S. (and, by extension, the world) economy.

Emerging in tandem with Nixon’s policy shift was a vast array of communication technologies that daily increased the speed of capital flows. Through the 1980’s, the technology bud-gets of Wall Streets firms rose by 19 percent annually; by 1991 they were spending a combined $7.5 billion in software and hardware, the sole function of which was the dematerialization of money. In the technological playpen of the world financial market, money became an image, simultaneously displayed everywhere, but existing nowhere. And now, every three days a sum of money passes through the fiber-optic network under-neath New York equal to the total output for one year of all of America’s companies and all of its workforce.

Growth-wealth

That which was fixed beneath the solidity of Fordism was opened up to revision and restructuring under flexibility. Accu-mulation itself remained the underlying market principle, but now both the means of accumulating, and the composition of accumulated material were subjected to drastic modification. It was marked by a direct confrontation with Fordism, where “the economies of scale sought under Fordist mass production have, it seems, been countered by an increasing capacity to manufac-ture a variety of goods cheaply in small batches. Economies of scope have beaten out economies of scale.”3

Flexible accumulation altered the very nature of production, and effected corresponding mental structures alongside flexible objects. Flexibility pushed exchange in two simultaneous and contradictory directions; towards both immateriality (in the form of new, marketable financial services, securities exchange, “knowledge” products, and service contracts) and a new type of materiality, one that re-imagines the Fordist commodity in an updated form. New immateriality—“new money”—multiplied and disseminated the possibilities of exchange, and forced new parameters on a sea of materiality that raced to keep up;

The half-life of a typical Fordist product was, for example, from five to seven years, but flexible accumulation has more than cut that in half in certain sectors (such as textile and cloth-ing industries), while in others—such as the so-called ‘thought-ware’ industries (video games and software programs)—the half life is down to less than eighteen months. Flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side, therefore, by a much greater attention to quick changing fashions and the mobilization of all the artifices of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies.4

If Fordism focused on producing more goods more cheaply,

then flexible accumulation has fixed its efforts to conferring more cheapness upon more goods. Flexible objects are produced so that they will die on time. Death is in-built. Products are sold as waste on life-support, with packaging, expiration dates and massive structural failure closely corresponding to the decreas-

3 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1989), 141-143. He con-tinues; “There were problems with the rigidity of long-term and large-scale fixed capital investments in mass-production systems that precluded much flexibility of design and presumed stable growth in invariant consumer markets. There were problems of rigidities in labor markets, labor allocation, and in labor

contracts. Behind all these specific rigidities lay a rather unwieldy and seemingly fixed configuration of political power and reciprocal relations that bound big labor, big capital, and big government into what increasingly appeared as a dysfunctional embrace of such narrowly defined vested interests as to under-mine rather than secure capital accumulation.”

4 Ibid., p. 157.2 Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 119-148.


5 “Fresh Kills was a baby boomer’s landfill. It opened just as the miracle of plastics devel-oped during WWII were reshaping what people used and threw away, and as the consumer cul-ture of convenience was about to unfold. But if times changed the pressures on Fresh Kills, so did the arc of the trash itself. In the 1960’s, the disposable diaper, in the mid-1970’s,

MacDonald’s switched to plastic foam for its packaging...in 1987, the first single-use dispos-able camera. The great waste stream shifted in its banks, and Fresh Kills took it all.” New York Times, March 18, 2001.

ing time spans of current trends (spans that may soon overlap their own becoming, negating the market value of newness). But while the life of the new object is short, its death is long and hideous, leaving us to contend with its durable synthetic corpse.5

The weakness of objecthood correlates to the status of the act of consumption. The timely death of an object would be pointless were it not certain to be quickly replaced. Acceler-ating turnover time in production would have been useless unless the turnover time in consumption were also reduced. The modulation of consumptive rates has now become the job of advertising and marketing. There is an image market that runs parallel to the flows of weak objects. Where it was once thought that supply was dependent on demand, it is now obvi-ous that, under specific conditions, demand is merely a facet of supply itself; desire and consent—to buy, to use, to consume, and to waste—are manufactured like any other product. Sup-ply was simply multiplied, waste produced (more) consumption, and Fresh Kills took it all.

We acknowledge several liberation movements during the 1960’s—racial, libidinal, ethical, gender—but we never men-tion the final act of liberation: monetary. The liberation of money, its dislocation from the materiality of gold (and of his-tory) was Richard M.’s final farewell to the hippies, a brilliant and simple action that seemingly ensured the death of radical liberation by negating the efficacy of the concept of freedom. In a contemporary America dominated by the daily infinity of monetary exchanges, it is increasingly difficult to imagine an act that transgresses the liberation of money. Freedom of the market takes on the appearance of total liberation. And yet, the economic ramifications of an actually liberated market (one in which market forces are interiorized, devoid of external non-market influences) fall in direct conflict with many of the princi-ples of accumulation that flexible practices retain from Fordism, and still rely on for sustenance and nourishment: primarily those methods that fall into the category of “state industrial policies,” i.e. protectionist tariffs, public subsidies, military trade associa-tions, and the like.

Contemporary industrial flexibility is a precisely controlled softening of rigidities, not a liquidation of them; decentral-ization, not dissolution; agility as strength, not as a sign of weakness. The contradictory marriage of techniques of flexible accumulation and free market rhetoric is defined as neoliberalism, and constitutes a major segment of our pres-ent morality. Its contradictory status is right now temporarily resolved through our collective faith in the appearance of a free market. This faith amounts to the belief that growth is not only always possible but also always necessary and always good, despite all evidence revealing the intense restrictions placed on growth to preserve the arrangements and techniques of accumulation. The faith is bolstered by a semiotic element within morality, namely economic discourse; “a self-referential language game with zero representational efficacy...designed to pre-assure the myth of near-perfect market self-determination under a regime of laissez-faire...Mathematics serves the same ideological function, in economics, that masses in Latin served the priesthood of the church.” 6

Neoliberalism is the conflation of material (things and bod-ies) and faith into new ideas and substances; the assimilation of competing desires into a seemingly plausible cosmological vision. It is an edict of all-encompassing morality, wherein the accumulation of elite personal wealth conveniently runs paral-lel to our sanctified submission to an economic order of appar-ently unsurpassable perfection. Neoliberalism confounds any attempt to maintain a clear moral division between the exchange of wealth, faith in free exchange, and the expansion of a con-sumptive order. It is the bridge between our faith and a form of wealth predicated on the channelization of growth. Here, within the concept of exchange, religion and economics become a single act, each adopting the characteristics of the other.

When we glance at Fresh Kills, we think we are witnessing the substantive manifestation—the “byproduct”—of untamed, unrestrained growth. In fact it is quite the opposite. Fresh Kills, as a landscape, is a reactive, rational vector within a morality predicated on the precise modulation and strict con-trol of any force of growth that might inhibit or alter estab-lished patterns of accumulation. Fresh Kills has no relationship

6 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, Against Economics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1997), 4.


to freedom, market or otherwise. Untamed growth is unaccept-able because it escapes our grip.

Closure

The rows of barges that a decade ago would line up on the Arthur Kill—nearly one an hour around the clock, 600 tons of trash each—sit tethered in rows, empty and bobbing on the tide. And soon they too will move on to other duties. Sometime over the next week or so, the last barge will bring its load, and then, in a stunning anticlimax, the future will arrive, and that will be that...The marks that it left on the New York psyche, and the imprint that millions of New Yorkers left upon it with the things they discarded, are only now emerging.7

The closure and imagined reclamation of Fresh Kills is an attempt to redraw exceeded limits; the hopeful projection of techniques of control to fetter an accidental urbanism. The technical resuscitation is being carried out by the coupling of opulent devices and sophisticated disciplinary knowledge; a soft massaging, directed by gentle engineers, under the supervision of massive capital agglomerations and vested interests. Every significant faction in the (albeit narrow) American political spectrum has a stake in this. Success is already conferred by seductive Photoshop images of supermodel-bestrewn landscapes and confident politicians, but excitement always surrounds the opportunity to experiment on ourselves. Because of its size and age—Fresh Kills opened when environmental controls were almost unheard of—the effort to close the dump safely and effi-ciently lies beyond the limits of modern landfill technology.

Fresh Kills is daily emitting the substances of our moral-ity. Above, it off-gases about 30 million cubic feet of methane gas each day; below, a torrent of toxic leachate is semi-cor-ralled into a processing facility. Both substances are deadly and volatile.8 Our first instincts when we encounter death are to “plan” it, channel it, coordinate it, use it if possible, but above all, bury it. The most advanced techniques of leachate control require the lining of the site prior to dumping. The runoff flu-ids are channeled into processing sites and treated as is best

7 New York Times, March 10, 2001.

8 In the United States 66,000 chemicals are used commercially, and worldwide 45,000 substances are traded. It is estimated that 1000 new chemicals are added each to the list each year. No study of the attenuation mechanisms for all chemicals in soil is available. A brief list of some of the chemicals designated as constitu-

ent elements in nonhazardous landfill leachate includes: aluminum, ammonium, arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chemical oxygen demand, chloride, chromium, copper, cyanide, fluor-ide, iron, lead, magnesium, man-ganese, mercury, nickel, nitrate, polychlorinated bi-phenyls, potassium, selenium, silica, sodium, sulfate, sodium, sulfate, viruses, volatile organic compounds, and zinc.

Leachate collection device (cross section)

Backfill1.25 cm WashedStone/Pea Gravel

possible. But Fresh Kills was born without a diaper, creating a more complex problem.

Handling the leachate poses even greater difficulties...To control leakage, the city started building two underground clay walls last year that will extend about eight miles and nearly sur-round the landfill. The walls, which descend 10 to 55 feet, will stop most of the leachate from flowing out. Miles of pipe also will be laid below ground within the wall to collect and trans-port the leachate to the treatment plant.9

The first leachate plant, built in 1994, now treats about 200,000 gallons of leachate a day with aerobic organisms that feed on the ammonia and organic materials. A second plant is under construction because the first cannot handle all the run-off, and leachate is flowing into the surrounding bay water. The plants will operate well into the 21st century. Time estimates are rarely offered for the various projects at Fresh Kills. Silence is evidence of extreme uncertainty.

Controlling the methane gas requires the opposite strategy. The decomposing waste is compacted, deodorized, and then capped with a final cover. Methane collection is a profitable business. The work is being performed at a severe capital-loss; a small portion of the costs are offset by methane energy produc-tion. The entire assembly is later buried beneath one or two feet of topsoil. The encapsulation concept itself—which is now cost-ing $225,000 per square acre at Fresh Kills—is quite unproven,

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9 New York Times, December 21, 1997.

Leachate newtork


and opposed by many engineers, who argue it will actually worsen the already dangerous effects of the methane-leachate cycle;

This approach has significant deficiencies that will ulti-mately threaten public health and the environment. First, leakage through the line is practically unavoidable because of manufacturing and construction-related defects. For a synthetic membrane liner the typical warranty is for about 20 years. Leachate formation and subsequent leakage from the landfill are unavoidable in the long run: encapsulation merely delays the process. Thus the encapsulated waste represents a perpetual threat to groundwater.10

into about 5 million cubic feet of a natural gas product. Within two years, there will be 700 wells across the landfill connected to the existing plant or to a second one that has yet to be built. The city is negotiating to sell the currently unprocessed landfill gas and is also seeking a state permit to flare any unsold gas.

Protective leachate aprons are territorial diapers, pinned by concrete dam cores. Methane top liners are territorial pro-phylactics with high failure rates. Both reveal the impotency of our technological responses to our technological lives. They are extravagant and uncertain gestures, temporarily comforting our consciences.

Urbanism

Resuscitated Fresh Kills is an urbanism, which is to say it is a technique for the extension of morality. Urbanisms are the methods that have developed historically as effective strategies for the development and sustenance of moral empires—they are massive and intricate devices of morality-extension, deploy-ing entire ways of life across space, containing all relationships known and unknowable. They are the concerted and calculated, planned, expansion of morality. Morality contains the totality of a given type of life; the preservation and nurturing of that type is the underlying motivation for all collective action, and action in accordance with these motives is perceived as truthful and good. Like most contemporary urbanisms, the Fresh Kills project is technological at root. Urbanism always carries with it its own demise; the calculated and simulated projection of danger (salva-tion always accompanies danger), with the real effect of failure. Violence is the trigger, but uncertainty and passivity always over-turn foresight and calculation, and intentions are cancelled to make room for “accidents.” Fresh Kills was born of death, built upon the expenditure of urbanization, the biomass, the flesh and the feathers and the detritus of our silent habits. Seashells, Burger King and vacuum tubes. It grew out of modern death—updated and diluted for our modern sensibilities, our modern morality. This death is acceptable (unlike the barbarism of ancient sacri-fice), processed, sanitized.

10 Amalendu Bagchi, Design, Construction, and Monitoring of Landfills (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 84.

Methane gas extraction well (cross section)

Fresh Kills is now capped, despite the controversial aspects of the method, for two unmentioned reasons; image and capital. Capping manufactures a palatable, and potentially profitable image. Flowers and field grass grow quickly across the thin epidermal soil, while the smell is virtually eliminated. Moral-ity always demands a corresponding aesthetic—in this case it required capping. The flaws in the image are only noticeable from a close distance, where one can begin to perceive the synthetic methane meters protruding from the ground, nearly obscured by amber waves of grain. About 400 wells have been dug into the landfill to help capture the gas, and about 150 of the wells are connected to pipes that run directly to a treatment plant that now converts 10 million cubic feet of landfill gas every day

6 mm Sample Port

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> see also> pp.98-99 > flowers, field Grass and

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Methane gas extraction wells, flare stations and processing plant


Virilio’s Law states that technological life simultaneously introduces the device and its accident (or, stated differently, the object and its violence): “To invent the train is to invent derail-ment; to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck.” 11 His thesis negates the concept of “byproducts” by appropriately posit-ing technology beyond any classical conception of causality. It unfolds simultaneously within the morality that imagines it. Vir-ilio’s argument can be taken one step further—to invent the train is to invent more than the train accident, it is also to invent the necessity (as desire) for train travel. Technologies not only pre-clude their own demise, but also prefigure their own significance.

Fresh Kills is the worried agglomeration of intentions and unintended consequences, holding all the carelessness, the well-meaning, the hopes, the desires, the nervousness, and the uncer-tainty of subjectivity—the frustration of our enslavement to nature and impulse, and our delight in the momentary resistance to that oppression that our devices seemingly provides us. Marx famously believed that with capitalist exchange all that is solid melts in to air. Maybe some of it just gets buried. Maybe a lot of it just gets piled up and ignored, catalogued and mapped by city engineers, reconstituted as no. 2 plastic. “The biggest secrets are the ones spread out before us.” 12

Like the greater technological project itself, the technical resuscitation of Fresh Kills is neither physics nor metaphys-ics, but rather pataphysics—a science of imaginary solutions. Urbanism may have begun as a primary technology, only once removed from nature. It then became, during the revolutions of industrialization and transportation, a secondary technology, twice removed from nature and once removed from itself (sani-tation and HVAC systems; devices that save us from nature by multiplying themselves). Now, it appears to be passing over to a tertiary technology, three times removed from nature, twice from itself, and once removed from its own failure. Fresh Kills belongs to the family of technologies that recognizes inevitable malfunction as a function of origin—like the parachute, the airbag, or the biosuits that wander its surface.

In his 1867 study on urban drainage, sanitary engineer George Waring spoke at length about the conditions on Staten

Island, imagining even then that something drastic needed to be done to remedy its swampy conditions if it were ever to be fit for occupation;

Probably the most striking instance of the effect of wetland on the growth and settlement of suburban districts is to be found on Staten Island. Within five miles of the Battery; acces-sible by the most agreeable and best managed ferry from the city, practically nearer to Wall Street than Murray Hill is; with the most charming views of land and water; with a beautifully diversified surface and an excellent soil; and affording capital opportunities for sea bathing, it should be—were it not for its sanitary reputation, it would be—one vast residence park.13

Waring’s dream has finally come true. Something drastic has been done; a thing drastic and horrible. The soil is no longer so “excellent,” and the surface is now “diversified” in crazy and unthinkable ways. But we now have our “vast residence park,” and Wall Street can have the “most charming views of land and water.” We can all ride the most “agreeable and best managed ferry.” We’ve erased its “sanitary reputation” as a breeding ground for insects and malaria, replacing it with a trashy legacy of our own making. Now we will simply do it again. It is still, today, entirely unclear how this becoming will take place, but it will no doubt occur entirely in the collective imagination, as the knowledge—the techniques—for accomplishing such a task simply do not exist, and cannot, given the uncertainty that sur-rounds the future of the garbage beneath. In truth we simply have no idea how it will behave. Architects (landscape or other-wise) have had little of substance to say on this matter, perhaps necessarily so.

Fresh Kills is our generation’s A-Bomb: we express dignified shame at the fact of its existence to mask our delight in know-ing that it belongs to us. It may be a disturbing thing, but it also seems somehow extraordinary, and in either case, it is our disturbing-extraordinary thing. We secretly love it. We like to know that it’s there. Its location with respect to Manhattan is indicative of a preferential derision; near enough to be seen, to enjoy the peace of mind provided by the power implicit in its existence, but too far away to be smelled, too distant to impose

11 Paul Virilio, “Interview with Der Derian,” in The Virilio Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 20.

12 Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 184-5.

13 George Waring, Draining for Profit, Draining for Health (New York: Orange Judd Com-pany, 1867), 209.

> see also> p.113 > devices and accidents


The author wishes to thank Sarah Whiting for her criticism and support, Jessika Creedon and Bruce Sporano for photographing the site, and Irene Hwang and Mario Ballesteros for their editorial assistance.

on our comfort. It is material evidence that the American Way of Life is still very much expanding, that our morality is still dominant, still at work in the corners of life. The size of the pile —taller than the Statue of Liberty across the bay—is evidence in support of our belief in American strength and control. Fresh Kills is the literal, substantive embodiment of the consumptive-moral technologies of flexible accumulation, of a late twenti-eth-century, Neoliberal American economy; a testament to the fecundity of its principal metropolitan region, its most promi-nent image of a free-market. Trash and waste are central ele-ments in our morality; they demonstrate our power, and allow us to sleep well.

On March 22, 2001, after years of keeping New York’s biggest secret, Fresh Kills finally closed, primed to begin its extravagant transfiguration. The landscape, stuffed and swollen from a fifty year diet of American industrial detritus, was being primed for a new life. A pause was underway, the gathering of strength and the licking of wounds. In April 2001, statements were being made, straight-faced, without a thought to the irony held in a concept such as “nature walks” on the vertiginous mountains of barely-concealed waste. In April 2001, we were dreaming that, with techniques untested, life will be furthered by our efforts. Just five months later the World Trade Centers were destroyed in a terrorist attack—faith and technology in violent exchange: urbanism. Fresh Kills was reopened the next day to accept barges carrying the debris from the wreckage.

On and on, and so it goes. There is trash, and waste, and there are huge piles of spent life. Urbanism belongs properly (at least in part, perhaps more so all the time) to the technical dimension of life. It is subject to the same contradictions and misconceptions as any other device. It kills in order to live. It is the disease and the vaccine; the bomb and the energy; the trauma and the therapy; the sewer and the anus. At times urban forms, like other technologies, are the transient emblems of a Rousseauist dream: nature made complicit to the will of hope. But most often, urbanism today—no matter how shiny, or natu-ral, or majestic its projection—is little more than the disaffected posturing of an ecology of excess. Someday soon the story of Fresh Kills will be accepted as gruesome evidence in the case against the brutalities of our present extravagance.

> see also> p.103 > architects on fresh kills

Verb > Upon its closure, the New York City government envi-sioned the total transformation of Fresh Kills Landfill into Fresh Kills Park. Three times the size of Central Park in Manhattan, this new park is the first and largest initiative of its kind since the late 19th century. The new park will offer canoeing and fishing, among other outdoor leisure activities. As the residents of Staten Island look forward to the definitive erasure of the world’s largest landfill, the ever-percolating leachate and methane off-gassing are a sinister reminder that the dump, is far from dead.


Fresh Kills, 2007Photos by Jessika Creedon

Bringing Back a Fresh Kill

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