At the start of the twenty-first century, the average American threw out more than 1,600 pounds of trash each year—50 percent more than residents of any other Western nation (7). No American city produced as much garbage as New York; and, no place on earth had as massive a dump as the Big Apple's smallest borough. Staten Island's 2,200 acre Fresh Kills Landfill handled the lion's share of New York's waste from 1948 to 2001. In Fresh Kills, the prolific environmental historian Martin Melosi tells the story of how and why Staten Island became the site of that landfill, what led to its closure, and how New Yorkers are currently transforming the site into a park three times the size of Central Park. Melosi's sweeping and well-researched study highlights the connections between mass consumption, waste, and place in America's greatest metropolis.
The combination of New York's explosive population growth and the advent of mass consumption in the late nineteenth century forced city leaders to confront two refuse problems. The first was the “physical distress caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and primitive methods of collection and disposal” (6). New York, like other cities, addressed these problems though expert management; in the 1890s, New York's commissioner of street cleaning, Colonel George Waring, mounted a successful campaign to rid the streets of filth. The second form of waste “linked to rising affluence . . . [and] an abundance of resources and consumerism” created greater challenges (6). Affluent people produced more “waste”—a category socially imposed on objects judged to have transient value. The practice of creating waste, in turn, led to the question of disposal, or the political determination about where to place unwanted items.
New York City struggled to find places to dispose of trash without imposing heavy burdens on its residents. Starting in the nineteenth century, the “land poor” city began dumping most of its garbage into the harbor and ocean (11). Refuse, in turn, destroyed oyster beds, obstructed navigation, and washed up on beaches, forcing policymakers to search for better solutions. From 1916 until 1918, the city attempted to site a waste reduction plant in the salt marshes of Staten Island, but residents mounted a bitter and ultimately successful campaign against it.
There were no good solutions to the garbage problem—and city officials would again look to Staten Island as a disposal site. In 1934 the city abandoned the policy of ocean dumping and began burning most of its trash in incinerators. Incinerators, though, cost a lot of money to build and maintain. Increasing toxins in the waste stream, moreover, made burning garbage more dangerous to residents' health and offensive to their nostrils. In 1937 Sanitation Commissioner William Carey embraced the idea of landfilling as an alternative to burning. Carey and the powerful planner-bureaucrat Robert Moses advocated building a landfill along the Fresh Kills estuary on Staten Island. With just 158,000 residents in the 1930s (the other boroughs' populations all exceeded one million), there were fewer voters to alienate by placing a dump on the island (129). Staten Island was, moreover, “close enough to the other boroughs for hauling waste by barge but far enough from their backyards” (169). Despite protests, in 1948 the first scow unloaded at Fresh Kills.
Over the next half century, a series of events dramatically changed the political calculus of dumping on State Island. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964, linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, where a real estate boom ensued. Staten Island's growing population bristled at the smells, seagulls, and rats emanating from Fresh Kills. The rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s, meanwhile, created a new awareness of the ecological value of marshlands, fueling criticism over the location of the dump. In 1990 Staten Islanders voted to secede from New York City when “frustration and outrage over their megalandfill and the endless stream of garbage scows from the other boroughs finally boiled over” (370).
Staten Island's secession attempt was ultimately blocked by lawmakers in the New York State Assembly, but Republican politicians nonetheless responded to its residents' grievances. Seeing crucial votes in the largely conservative borough, in 1996 three Republican leaders—Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Governor George Pataki, and Borough President Guy Molinari—announced that they would close Fresh Kills. Giuliani began to export trash to other states. In 2001 the landfill closed, although it was temporarily reopened to receive rubble and human remains after the September 11th attacks. Under Giuliani's successor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, the city began transforming the landfill into Freshkills Park, which partially opened in 2012 and is scheduled for completion in the 2030s.
One fascinating aspect of the story of Fresh Kills is that the people who bore the brunt of the landfill's nuisances were largely white and fairly prosperous. New York City officials targeted Staten Island for dumping because of its geography, relatively low population, and, for a time, political impotence. In these respects, the story told in Fresh Kills is distinctive from that in many works which show how race shaped where cities discarded trash. Melosi does not say much, however, about how the history of Fresh Kills compares to that of dumps in other cities or how his study fits in a larger historiography about garbage. Given that Melosi is the author of several important works about the history of trash, it would have been illuminating to hear him comment more on those matters.
Melosi's narrative forces readers to consider the consequences of our participation in a consumer culture. “Fresh Kills,” Melosi writes, “is a monument to those consequences—materially, spatially, and culturally” (555). The landfill and the park now being constructed atop it are—like Melosi's fine book—important reminders that we cannot entirely forget or be free of what we discard.
