STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – If you want to know what made Staten Islanders feel like they lived in a forgotten borough, look no further than the Fresh Kills Landfill.
If you weren’t alive or didn’t live here during the half-century that the landfill was in disgusting, disgraceful operation, it’ll be hard for you to imagine just how much of a blight the dump was. Not just on the Staten Island landscape, but on the actual souls of Staten Islanders.
Start first with the Big Lie, when Islanders were told that the dump, opened in 1948, would be in operation for just a few years.
Decades later, the towering mounds of landfill trash could be seen from space.
The landfill turned us from a bucolic enclave where you could escape the urban din of the other boroughs into the home of “Da Dump,” the largest landfill in creation.
But wait, there’s more.
Not only did Fresh Kills stay in operation, but it expanded by leaps and bounds as other landfills around the city were shuttered. After all, nobody wants to live near a landfill, do they?
Soon enough, Fresh Kills was the only landfill in the city. We took all of the city’s garbage, day after nauseating day. Hundreds of millions of tons.
The Twin Towers overlook the sanitation vehicles at the Fresh Kills Landfill in a 1996 photo. The towers eventually were the only city landmark that could be seen above the landfill. (Staten Island Advance Photo/ Mike Falco)
That’s all that Staten Island was to the city: A borough to be plundered for its property taxes and a place where they could dump all the city’s refuse.
There’s no way to describe the gagging odor that emanated from the dump. You could smell it at the Staten Island Mall. Homeowners in towns around the dump couldn’t open their windows in the spring and summer. They couldn’t hold cookouts in their backyards.
Paper and other debris flew off the garbage mounds in the wind, catching in the trees and power lines along Arden Avenue.
Off-Islanders joked that they always knew without looking that they were driving on the West Shore Expressway because of that infamous odor. For many outsiders, the dump was the only thing that they knew about Staten Island. That, and maybe the ferry.
And here’s the kicker: Everybody in government knew that the landfill was an illegal operation. It broke every environmental law on the books. But they shrugged. It was only Staten Island, after all.
Islanders were lied to for decades. Our home was made into a garbage dump. That’s why Staten Islanders have trust issues with government. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for the next horrible project that the city or state will foist on us. That’s why we’re suspicious. That’s why we’ve felt forgotten.
We never thought that the landfill could ever be closed. It was our Berlin Wall, an inescapable fact of life on this island Staten.
That changed under GOP Borough President Guy Molinari.
The last barge of garbage arrives at the Fresh Kills landfill on March 22, 2001. (Staten Island Advance)
Using his closeness with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Molinari moved to close the dump. He had to do a little bullying to get it done. He led a lawsuit against the city and his friend Giuliani to get Fresh Kills closed.
Eventually every Island elected official got a piece of the closure pie, but it was Molinari who started the ball rolling. It was Molinari and his counsel, Daniel Master Jr., who dared to dream something that many of us thought impossible.
The final load of garbage arrived at the dump on March 22, 2001. Now the landfill is going to be one of the biggest parks in city history. It’s slowly being returned to its former bucolic glory.
But the memory of the systemic lies and deceit, the way the city, the state and the feds allowed Staten Island to be dumped on and poisoned, will take a while longer to fade away.
The Link LonkMarch 14, 2021 at 09:01PM
https://www.silive.com/news/2021/03/dumped-on-and-lied-to-fresh-kills-landfill-was-the-root-of-sis-forgotten-borough-syndrome-opinion.html
Dumped on and lied to: Fresh Kills Landfill was the root of SI’s ‘forgotten borough’ syndrome (opinion) - SILive.com
https://news.google.com/search?q=fresh&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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