A Wooded Prairie Springs From a Site Once Piled High With Garbage

www.nytimes.com - South of the Belt Parkway near Exit 15 in Brooklyn, approaching Kennedy International Airport, an unassuming hill slopes upward, dotted with small, scraggly trees and bushes.

A quarter-century ago, the hill was a more memorable sight. It was the Fountain Avenue Landfill.

“Itwas an ugly old dump,” said Lee Shelley, a longtime resident of theStarrett City neighborhood who heads a citizens’ committee that, fornearly two decades, pestered the city, then cooperated with it, toclean up and transform the pile of garbage.

Today, someone at thetop of the hill stands 130 feet above the sea in a field of prairiegrasses. It is some of the highest ground in the city, its panoramicviews taking in the Empire State Building to the northwest, theVerrazano-Narrows Bridge and New York Harbor to the west, Jamaica Bayto the south.

In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfillwith a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of naturepreserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York Citylong ago.

The site is not yet open to the public. Indeed, it isstill listed by the state as a toxic waste site. But the air is clearand fresh.

“You can probably compare it with a day in the Alps,”Mr. Shelley said during a tour given to local residents by the citythis summer. “We had hoped we would have a park. It’s turned out to bebetter than a park.”

The Fountain Avenue Landfill opened in 1961,filling up with residential trash, construction debris, asbestosincinerator ash and, notoriously, the bodies of mob victims. In itslast year of operation, 1985, an average of 8,200 tons of trash arrivedthere each day — some 40 percent of the city’s refuse. The PennsylvaniaAvenue Landfill was open from 1956 to 1980. In its later years, it wasprimarily a dump for debris from construction and demolition.

Onceclosed, the landfills were deemed by the city to be ecologically“sanitary,” meaning they caused no significant harm or health problems,but still offended the senses. Fires often smoldered, emitting putridodors. Runoff containing heavy metals, oil, pesticides and PCBs flowedinto Jamaica Bay. Residents complained about health concerns, andfinally, in 1995, hammered out an agreement with the city torehabilitate the dumps.

During that era, the thinking aboutwhat to do with closed landfills was evolving, too. The piles were“capped” with a layer of clay and plastic to keep water out, andcovered with a few inches of soil. The usual practice was to plantgrass and mow it as if it were a big lawn.

In the 1980s, Leslie Sauer, a founder of Andropogon Associates,a landscape architect firm in Philadelphia, was one of the first tothink landfills had more potential. “The idea of mowing landfills islunacy,” she said.

While working as a consultant for FreshKills, a former city garbage dump on Staten Island, she surveyed thefate of other closed landfills. “We could not find one landfill thatwas being maintained,” she said. Instead of a manicured lawn, thelandfill grass inevitably turned into “a weedy junk pile,” she said.

Threefeet of soil on top of the landfill cap would hold more moisture, Ms.Sauer surmised, allowing a wider array of plants to grow. Even trees.The common wisdom was never to put trees on a landfill because theroots would push down and puncture the cap.

But in her surveys,Ms. Sauer found that trees inevitably started growing on top oflandfills anyway, and that roots typically spread out in a wide butfairly shallow pattern. The network of roots would also do a better jobof holding the soil together against erosion than plain grass, and theresult might be a sustainable ecology instead of a monotonous grassyhill that required continuous lawn care.

John McLaughlin, whodirects the ecological rehabilitation of the Brooklyn landfills for theDepartment of Environmental Protection and worked with Ms. Sauer atFresh Kills, carved up the landscape into a series of “islands,”assigning a different mix of plants to reflect a different ecologicalniche in the region. Some resemble the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Others drew inspiration from Sandy Hook, N.J., and Fire Island.

Thefirst seeds were laid down in 2004 on the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill,followed a year later by the first plantings of shrubs and trees, at adensity of 800 to 1,000 per acre, about double what typically grow in anatural setting. The final plantings went in last year. All told, theecological portion of the landfill project cost about $20 million.

More than 93 percent of the trees and shrubs have survived.

“We call this the birth of a forest,” Mr. McLaughlin said. In a decade, the trees might be 20 to 25 feet tall.

Once the plants take hold, nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates.In some areas that turned out to be damper than had been foreseen,sassafras and black oak, which prefer dry soil, are not doing as wellas expected, but other plants should prosper, Mr. McLaughlin said.

Birds including ospreys, egrets and snowy owls are spotted and counted at the former landfills.

“My friends were all like, ‘You’re going where to work with wildlife?’ ” said Lee Humberg, one of the United States Department of Agriculture biologists keeping watch over the site. “One wouldn’t expect to find a prairie setting in New York City.”

Aspokeswoman for the New York State Department of EnvironmentalConservation said the Fountain Avenue and Pennsylvania AvenueLandfills, currently listed as a “significant threat to the publichealth or environment,” could be reclassified by next spring as safefor public access, requiring only continued monitoring of theirconditions.

Then the final steps for opening them to the publicwould start. Mr. Shelley, the Starrett City resident, envisions anamphitheater for concerts, bicycle paths and fishing areas, perhapswithin a handful of years. “What they’re doing here,” he said, “was anabsolute miracle.”