Exploring Staten Island’s Brookfield Park, a toxic dump turned wetlands habitat

On a recent winter’s day, down in the southern reaches of Staten Island, a small celebration was held to mark the opening of a unique new park. Neighborhood residents, city employees, and elected officials gathered together to mark the occasion, delivering speeches and cutting the ribbon for Brookfield Park, a 258-acre landscape of manmade grasslands, woodlands, and marshes.

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“It’s not often that in such a densely populated city as New York that we can find this much space to create a park,” says Vincent Sapienza, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which oversaw the creation of the Brookfield Park. “We planted more than 17,000 trees on the site. We also restored the park’s surrounding wetlands by sowing more than 76,000 plants to preserve 16 acres of tidal and freshwater wetlands.”

Although overshadowed by the ongoing work at Freshkills Park, which is located just downstream, Brookfield Park is probably the nicest park built on top of a toxic waste dump that you will find in New York City. Its rolling hills are lined with pleasantly looping footpaths that look out over Richmond Creek, its expansive fields are home to a wide variety of seasonal wildflowers, and its hidden vales contain New York’s first wetlands habitat built above a capped landfill.

As several speakers made clear during their opening remarks, however, the park’s creation was a long and torturous process, stretching back to the 1970s, when the Brookfield Avenue Landfill was still collecting garbage. The remediation of this city-owned dump has taken decades, with this most recent effort coming in at a cost of $256 million, or about a million dollars per acre. Included in that price are two million tons of fresh soil spread across an impermeable barrier, which are meant to protect park visitors and the neighboring wetlands from buried toxins.

“After years of closure and capping work by the Department of Environmental Protection, this former landfill is now getting a new life,” remarked Mitchell Silver, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which will manage the site in the future. “This is a city that knows how to heal its land. We are now giving these damaged and bruised sites, these contaminated sites, back to public use…. I hope you will walk around and take in the miraculous transformation.”

It is remarkable to consider just how much the landscape here has changed since the 1970s, when the mountains of trash at the Brookfield Landfill would spontaneously combust on sunny days, sparking garbage fires that would release plumes of smoke high over Staten Island. After the closure of the landfill in 1980, even more environmental problems emerged, as neighbors began to be sickened by noxious fumes released by its rotting debris, leading to widespread reports of nausea, rashes and respiratory illnesses.

It was around this same time that the city discovered the landfill had been used as an illegal dumpsite for toxic waste throughout the 1970s, contaminating the land with cyanide, lead, arsenic, and other deadly agents. After a Sanitation Department official was convicted of accepting bribes to allow the dumping, the city completed a $10 million cleanup at the site, covering it over with a clay cap planted with grass seeds. And then, the Brookfield Landfill was apparently left to become an overgrown, unplanned public space.

“We ran a pretty lousy landfill at Brookfield,” admitted Norman Steisel, the Sanitation Commissioner at the time, in a 1985 New York magazine interview. “Fortunately, the testing showed there was no damage to the environment.”

In reality, however, the Brookfield Landfill continued to leak out “95,000 gallons of contaminated water every day,” polluting the groundwater and nearby Richmond Creek with pesticides, lead, cadmium and other toxic runoff for several more decades.

“We are standing at the scene of a crime—an environmental crime was committed here at the hands of the New York City Government,” New York State Senator Andrew Lanza remarked at the opening of Brookfield Park. “Under their purview they allowed toxic waste and heavy metals to be dumped on this site. From the ashes here, we have this beautiful gift to the people of Staten Island. But it is important that we know how we arrived at this moment. It was a great struggle.”

After the speeches and ceremonies were finished, and the politicians and city officials had departed, a quiet hush fell over the newly opened park. A few solitary visitors had come to explore its trails and roadways, but the hills and valleys of its interior were mostly empty. As a light rain began to fall, the hazy solitude created a perfect atmosphere for wandering through this strange, manmade landscape.

The entirety of Brookfield Park’s complicated network of ecosystems, including its species selection, soil composition, and wetlands layout, was designed by John McLaughlin, the managing director at the DEP’s Bureau of Environmental Planning & Analysis. With an encyclopedic knowledge of the dozens of species in the park, and of the native ecology of the entire mid-Atlantic region, his dedication to the remediation of this once-blighted landscape is clearly evident.

“It’s not about planting individual species. It’s about putting those communities and ecosystems back, and putting as much of the scaffolding as you can,” explains McLaughlin, who first started working on the design of Brookfield 17 years ago. “You can’t put the entire system back as it once was, but you can put back the fundamental beams that support the community.”

The location of every plant in Brookfield Park has been marked using GPS, and every tree has been tagged with a barcode detailing its species, the day it was planted, the nursery it came from, and the county it originated in, allowing the DEP to track the growth rate of individual genotypes. This attention to detail is all part of a much larger vision for Brookfield Park, which will take many more decades to unfold, as its grasslands fade away and are replaced by 50-foot woodlands growing on top of the landfill cap.

“It is for future generations. It is not instant gratification,” says McLaughlin, explaining that much of the landscape here is currently in its earliest stages, made up of new, young plantlings grown specially for the park. “When we do the initial planting, we can only set the table, and then the site begins to take over. It’s a long term process, where I may not see it, my children may not see it, but perhaps my children’s children may see it.”

In recent decades, as New York City has slowly remediated many of its landfills, dumps and toxic waste sites, several of these polluted areas have been reopened as public spaces. The Edgemere Landfill is now a green hilltop; the Ferry Point landfill has become a luxury golf course operated by Donald Trump; the enormous Fresh Kills Landfill is slowly becoming Freshkills Park; and the illegal toxic dump at Bush Terminal is now a public recreation area.

As each of these sites shows, it is possible to remediate even the most toxic sites in New York City. And for Staten Island, which was once a dumping ground for the entire city, these cleanups are an important step in the healing process. “This is a victory for the people of Staten Island,” said Senator Lanza. “It’s a good ending to this story, but it started tragically, and we’ve got to learn from those lessons.”

Brookfield Park’s 258 acres are divided into two main sections. Its eastern landfill mound has been transformed into a series of indigenous plant ecosystems, while its western hills will largely be used for ballfields and recreation.

Up on top of the park’s eastern hill, the landscape is now mostly covered in native grasses. “There are the four main prairie grasses—big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, and Indian grass, but there are many other grasses and wildflowers out there,” says McLaughlin. “It’s probably on the order of 25 to 30 different species.”

“Grasslands in general are the most underrepresented type of community in the city,” says McLaughlin, surveying his handiwork. “They are ideal sites for monarchs and other butterflies to stop and feed as they go on their journey.”

“It’s kind of washed out because it’s December, but if you were here in August, the goldenrods and Aster would be in full bloom,” says McLaughlin. “It’s designed in such a way that you have some spring wildflowers, some summer wildflowers, and some fall wildflowers, so there is always something, someplace, in bloom.”

Brookfield Park is also designed to control all of the rain and snow that falls onto it, either absorbing it into its new soil and plants, or routing it away from the landfill through a system of wetlands, channels, and culverts. “What you don’t see below the surface is an impervious liner,” says McLaughlin. “You don’t want water permeating through the liner.”

As the snow melt trickled downhill, it was routed along several rocky channels, which directed the water into the park’s chain of wetlands, with each feature helping filter the water. “There is not an instant runoff,” explains McLaughlin. “And even if it does get to the end, it’s gone through a lot of treatment. All that filtering has cleansed it.”

One of the most unique features in the park is a wetlands built above the capped landfill, on its eastern hill. “Obviously, by placing a wetland on a landfill, you are purposefully encouraging water to sit there, so there was some concern over that,” notes McLaughlin. “So that everyone felt comfortable, where those wetlands are, the liner is actually double.”

This is the first wetlands built on top of a capped landfill in New York, and was built to encourage biodiversity in the park. “We wanted to put as many different ecosystems there that one would find in nature, or would have found pre-European settlement,” explains McLaughlin. “You have grasslands next to woodlands next to wetlands, and that increase in biodiversity really enhances the ecological value of the site.”

The entire eastern mound is ringed by concrete gutters, which collect any runoff not absorbed by the plants and wetlands.

These gutters channel the precipitation beneath the park’s roadways and out to a larger systems of wetlands, marshes, and ponds that have been built along the outside edges of the former landfill.

These water features vary in size, with some resembling creeks and others large ponds. They border the entire southern side of the park, adjacent to Arthur Kill Road, effectively forming a moat between nearby homes and the former landfill.

The park has several miles of roadways that are also intended for recreational uses. “First bike in the park,” said this visitor, as he zipped by. “It’s beautiful!”

Other visitors are also now exploring the new landscape. This groundhog had found a lair in a culvert next to the roadway, where he watched the human visitors trickling in.

The center of the park, between its two hills, is now also dominated by a large wetlands, where water flows down from the hills and into the more natural salt marshes of Richmond Creek, which flows along the northern side of the site.

On the park’s western side, the hills were not as extensively designed. Eventually, their flat expanses may be used for baseball fields and other recreational uses, ringed by tall stands of maritime red cedar and pitch pine oak.

For now, these hills are mostly visited by a few stray deer who have found their way into the park, despite an eight-foot-tall deer fence that surrounds it. “When you stick out young plants like that, you may as well be putting out filet mignon. Those are all very tender, juicy meals for deer,” notes McLaughlin.

The perimeter of these hills have been planted with indigenous tree species. “In the short term—20 or 30 years, or a bit longer—that will be predominantly a grassland, but then as the trees grow, in certain spots, it will become more of a woodland,” says McLaughlin.

In the winter, Brookfield Park feels like a young, wild, and somewhat monotone landscape, but as it grows wilder, and more diverse, it will slowly reveal its hidden designs. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” notes McLaughlin. “Some folks may see that landscape and say it looks pretty unkempt, and they would prefer a lawn, but I would take that view any day over a lawn.”

Nathan Kensinger is a photographer, filmmaker, and curator who has been documenting New York City's abandoned edges, endangered neighborhoods, and post-industrial waterfront for more than a decade. His Camera Obscura photo essays have appeared on Curbed since 2012. His photographs have been exhibited by the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the NYC Parks Department, and inside the Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center subway station.