This March marks the 10th anniversary of the closing of New York City's Fresh Kills Landfill, which was once the largest landfill in the world. To commemorate the event, the Staten Island Borough President's Office is producing a documentary that will recount the highly publicized closing of the site and detail the ongoing transformation of the property into a city park that will be three times the size of Manhattan's Central Park. In all, this conversion is expected to take 30 years.
In the course of trying to foster Fresh Kills' transition from blight to boon, there has already been an artists' competition for redesigns, a haiku contest, and an anthropological reassessment of the site's significance.
The clip below is a preview of the documentary, which is slated to be released later this later and features interviews with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New York Governor George Pataki and current New York City Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, among others.
From the Waste Age archive: "With Closure of Fresh Kills, New York Begins Its New Era of Exportation"