The Fresh Kills Landfill of New York City

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

The episode explores the history and cultural impact of Fresh Kills, Staten Island's massive landfill that operated from 1948 to 2001. Host Kell

Key takeaways

• Fresh Kills accumulated over 150 million tons of NYC trash across 2,000 acres, peaking at 29,000 tons daily in 1991.
• Robert Moses selected Staten Island's salt marshes for the dump in the 1940s as a supposedly temporary solution that lasted over five decades.

Main topics

• Fresh Kills Landfill
• Staten Island secession movement

Notable quotes

"We're standing on the story of New York City."

Conclusion

The episode highlights how a municipal waste site became an enduring symbol of

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 2 (0:11) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker 2 (0:17) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. Speaker 2 (0:23) So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond Borders. Speaker 8 (0:35) In New York, the city sends its garbage to a massive dump on nearby Staten Island. Speaker 7 (0:41) It's near the water, you can feel the hot sun, and on a clear day you can even see the Twin Towers. Speaker 8 (0:47) Over 2,000 acres of garbage. The operation here runs 24 hours a day, six days a week. It has to. Speaker 6 (0:57) The Fresh Kills landfill of New York City. Speaker 8 (1:00) Every 24 hours, a fresh layer of dirt is put down. to keep flies and rats away. Speaker 6 (1:06) This infamous, gross mound that was in operation for more than 50 years. Speaker 8 (1:12) Now, the garbage here is piled pretty deep or pretty high, depending on how you look at it. By the year 2000, some of the piles could be over 500 feet above sea level, which will make them, believe it or not, the tallest mountains on the entire eastern shore. Speaker 6 (1:32) That didn't actually happen, but for a very long time, fresh kills on Staten Island is where the other boroughs of New York, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, dumped their garbage. The Speaker 8 (1:45) simple but astonishing fact is that Americans generate more than 150 million tons of garbage each year. Speaker 7 (1:55) Welcome to the city's largest garbage dump. Speaker 6 (2:14) I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, with the help of Ben Nadef-Haffrey from Revisionist History, we're going to Fresh Kills in Staten Island. A pile of trash that grew so tall and so vast, it inspired a secession movement and changed the people who grew up beside it. Speaker 6 (2:51) Okay, so what is it like when your whole life you look out the window and see a mountain of trash? Or every time you come home from a trip, you smell it before you see it? For decades, this is what it was like to live in Staten Island. Because from 1948 to 2001, Staten Island is where most of New York City's trash ended up. What does that do to people? And then what happens when it just goes away, gets buried underground, becomes a grassy hill where new species of birds you've never seen replace the swarms of seagulls? Ben Nadif-Haffrey is here to help us understand all of this. He wrote, reported, and hosted The Staten Island Problem. It is a five-part series for the Revisionist History Podcast. And the show looks at the period from 1989 to 1993 when Staten Island attempted to secede from New York City. Ben, welcome. Speaker 4 (3:48) Thanks for having me. Speaker 6 (3:50) Just to start off, for people who haven't been there recently, can you just describe what Staten Island looks like today? Speaker 4 (3:57) Staten Island's actually like a beautiful place. It's sort of hilly. You have these amazing views of the harbor and of the Statue of Liberty. Like, it is an island. And so you used to have shoals of oysters rimming the island. There was a huge oyster industry in Staten Island. And to the west of the island, there are these mounds. And they are the mounds of the Fresh Kills dump, which is, you know, built on a salt marsh. And that's kind of like the center of this whole story. Speaker 6 (4:27) What Speaker 4 (4:27) actually is underneath? Right now, Fresh Kills is home to 150 million tons of waste. Speaker 6 (4:35) And Speaker 4 (4:36) when I was reporting my series, I took a trip out there, actually with the Department of Sanitation's anthropologist in residence, Robin Nagel. And Speaker 5 (4:45) this is an archaeologist's dream in 500 years, let's say. Speaker 4 (4:50) Which is, you know, of the many reasons I love the city, the fact that we have... A person with that job is one of them. Speaker 6 (4:56) Yes, that that job exists. Yes. Speaker 4 (4:59) But we went out there and to look at it now, you would never know that it was a landfill because the trash has been capped and there's dirt and soil and, you know, grass grown over it. And so it just looks like these rolling hills. Second glance, you see that it's dotted with all of these pipes and the pipes are there to extract the methane from the trash that is lying beneath. But. Standing there as part of this reporting trip and asking this anthropologist, like, what are we standing on right now? She said this beautiful thing, which is just... Speaker 5 (5:32) We're standing on the story of New York City. If you lived here between 1948 and 2001, you're here somewhere. Maybe not in this exact mound, but some piece of you, even if you just pass through, some piece of you is underneath us. Speaker 4 (5:46) It's just this, like, archaeologically rich site of, like, underneath these mounds. is a piece of everyone who was in New York City in that half century. That's pretty incredible. Yeah. And there's a lot of sort of like resentment and animosity politically buried in that trash too. Speaker 6 (6:09) So how Speaker 4 (6:10) did all this happen? How did this landfill happen? So trash has always been a huge problem in New York City. New York is this industrial powerhouse, huge population, but it's very land poor. There's just not a lot of space. And so in the 19th century, early 19th century, trash is already a huge problem in New