Review: Martin V. Melosi's Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City
Reviewed by Simone M. Müller
Fresh Kills Landfill was a human-made structure whose scale was gigantic in every conceivable dimension. With some 400 staff on site, holding twenty different job titles, the facility covered an area of about 3,000 acres, 2200 of which were available for fill. At the peak of its operation, in the late 1980s, Fresh Kills received about 29,000 tons of New York City’s municipal solid waste on a daily basis. Until its closure in 2001, Fresh Kills functioned as the world’s largest landfill in the heart of one of the world’s megacities. More impressive than the sight, to neighboring residents on Staten Island, were the overpowering smells emanating from its four ninety- to 225-foot-tall mounds, its mosquitoes, and the leachate containing microbes, metals, arsenic, and PCBs that oozed from the landfill in all directions.
Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City
By Martin V. Melosi
Columbia University Press, 2020
800 pages
Among the many impressive human-made structures that make New York City iconic, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, or the Empire State Building, “the Dump” usually does not make the top-ten list. Despite being a discard scholar and environmental historian, it never made mine. Martin V. Melosi’s book Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City engagingly shows why it should, and has me now eagerly wanting to see Fresh Kills — or what’s left of it — myself. In the city that never sleeps, where entertainment, shopping, and cuisine are defining features, the scarred landscape of Fresh Kills illuminates the flipside of such forms of mass consumption.
With 800 pages, Melosi’s book is as massive as it is monumental, crowning the career of this esteemed urban and environmental historian with a true masterpiece. Fresh Kills eloquently tells the complex and — from an environmental perspective — often frustrating story of humankind’s relationship to consumption and waste. Using this mega-landfill as both a symbol and a site, Melosi astutely reconstructs the almost astonishing, century-long persistence of diametrically opposed practices of externalization and NIMBYism (not in my backyard) which were violently and insolubly entangled with New York’s multi-ethnic, multi-borough grid. Fresh Kills is a story of “othering” an initially predominantly-white Staten Island which begins long before the landfill opened in 1948. It is also a story of politicians and New Yorkers evading the inconvenient truth that their rising levels of consumption relied on a defunct system of waste disposal. Finally, it is a story questioning if landfills can ever be reclaimed as “pure” spaces for recreational enjoyment.
Melosi tells the story of Fresh Kills in six parts and twenty chapters, each neatly dedicated to a particular episode in the landfill’s life. He commences the story from the ground up, allowing readers to grasp New York City as a conglomeration of islands and a place built in large parts on landfill. Wrestling with limited acreage from the 17th century onward, New York City expanded by filling in some 300 square miles of wetlands with construction rubble, ashes, or other discarded material. Similarly, the creation of Fresh Kills Landfill from wetlands in northwestern Staten Island was embedded in Robert Moses’ vision to turn marsh “waste” land into space that could accommodate the first section of the projected West Shore Expressway, industrial development, new parkland, and an expansion of the island’s airport while simultaneously solving the city’s ongoing waste crisis.
Freshkills park, 2010 (c) James Dunham, Creative commons license 2.0
In the 19th century, New York City was notorious for its filth and dirt. While other North American cities had commenced street-cleaning programs, travelers on approaching vessels claimed they could smell New York City before they could see it. New York’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY), founded in 1881, took on but simultaneously failed the challenge of sorting out the city’s troubles with waste. By the 1890s, New York City was already exasperated by its “garbage problem.” In 1952, novelist and playwright Edna Ferber received enormous public attention and support when she called New York the most “disgustingly filthy” city in the world. Both city government and the DSNY struggled with massively rising waste levels — a seventy-eight percent increase between 1955 and 1965 alone — and constant opposition and resentment toward the siting of landfill and trash facilities in the city’s neighborhoods.
Technological “fixes” to New York City’s waste problems rose and fell in favor. For much of the early 20th century, thousands of apartment building incinerators and municipal incinerators burned much of New York’s waste before largely disappearing, only to reemerge time and again as “the panacea.” Large portions of New York’s municipal solid waste were sent to eighty-nine city-owned landfills, eventually including Fresh Kills. Planned as a temporary solution until new municipal incinerators were built in each of the boroughs, it steadily grew into the city’s primary waste disposal facility. By the mid-1980s, the Dump was the city’s only landfill and, as such, took in almost all varieties of waste material.
Staten Island was no haphazard choice for “the Dump.” Within the land-poor island geography of New York City, specific islands were valuable as sites for containing people and activities regarded as unsavory or unwanted. These purposes included quarantining the sick, confining criminals, detaining immigrants, or dumping waste. For a long period of its history Staten Island found itself considered as one of these “other islands,” first as the location of the Tompkinsville Quarantine for incoming travelers, opened in 1799, and later as the site of a potential waste reduction plant in 1916. Both incidents served as the prologue to the unwelcome placement of the landfill on Staten Island in 1948. Melosi’s discussion of this history sets in context the long legacy of local resistance to such forms of othering, ranging from the burning of the Quarantine building in the denouement of the “Quarantine War” of the 1840s and 1850s, the “Garbage War” of 1916–1918, and the island’s repeated moves towards secession from New York City. Reading Fresh Kills’ story within this longue-durée trajectory, the surprising finding is how long Staten Islanders successfully managed to thwart plans of being turned into New York City’s overall waste dump and also how, in the end, they managed to get Fresh Kills closed as well. Its exceptionality comes out clearly when reading this story against the backdrop of other cases of environmental justice in other boroughs, as explicated in Julie Sze’s Noxious New York.
Melosi’s Fresh Kills offers a number of smaller gems a reader needs to pay careful attention to when considering the book as a whole, as they are not developed as strongly as the main arguments on place and consumption. One is the presence of women activists, such as Mrs. Charles E. Simson, head of the Women’s Anti-Garbage League in the early 20th century, and Elizabeth A. Connelly, a Democratic assemblywoman for Staten Island in the late 20th century, underlining the need for gender awareness in studying environmental justice debates. The other is the rather ethnographic approach in this book, as Melosi time and again weaves in voices from people living close or working with the Dump on Staten Island, such as William “Bill” Criaris, general superintendent at Fresh Kills.
The chapter “Fresh Kills and Community” illustrates how Fresh Kills was not only a source of nuisance for Staten Islanders but also a source of income for many local families. When the announcement of the Dump’s upcoming closure in 2001 was made in 1996, some 180 tractor and crane operators at Fresh Kills felt they had been forgotten. In a letter to Connelly, they decried the closure of the landfill as primarily political and only secondarily an environmental decision, if one at all. If the landfill truly was a health hazard, why had no one done a health study on those who worked there every day? Was it because it was “easier to forget about [them]” or because politicians were “afraid to find out that it isn’t really as bad as everyone wants to believe”? In any case, the closure of Fresh Kills revealed to Connelly how “the city [had] hidden behind the ‘luxurious’ explanation that garbage was only the problem in one of its boroughs… With Fresh Kills’ closing, garbage becomes every borough’s... every New Yorker’s ... problem.”
Today, Fresh Kills landfill is a site not only of enormous magnitude, but also of multitudes. After the landfill closed in early 2001, it reopened as a center for sorting building debris and human remains from the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and again briefly in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy. Fresh Kills now is no longer solely a wounded landscape in the form of a former sanitary landfill, but also has a new ceremonial significance because it serves as burial ground and memorial for victims from the 9-11 attacks. In 2003, the site began yet another transformation as the City of New York conducted a master planning process to turn Fresh Kills into a newly envisioned parkland. Plans called for the world’s largest reclamation project, encompassing wetlands, recreational facilities, landscaped public parkland, and a 9-11 memorial. For Melosi, the key question in the thirty-year transformation of “the Dump” into Freshkills Park is if this engineered landscape is more worthy to preserve as a human or a natural artifact. While momentum has moved to restore Fresh Kills to match its pre-landfill state, Melosi urges that the long and violent history of the Dump should not be overwritten or erased as the waste fill is overgrown and covered by a golf course and other amenities. Fresh Kills is a site as much as it is a symbol, and its history is cumulative, not episodic. It is a supreme example of the serious consequences of massive environmental transformation: it is an altered landscape and socialscape that affected and still affects not only Staten Island, but all of New York City and beyond.
Fresh Kills is a book for urbanists, discard studies scholars, environmentalists, and those who are both drawn to and repelled by the city’s gargantuan scale. It is an intimate testimonial to the city’s workings, and how what it consumes and discards produced tumultuous battles for suitable disposal space in this socially, ethnically, and economically very diverse place. Fresh Kills is also a piece about mourning the scars in our landscapes engineered to harbor the remnants of modern mass consumption, and a subtle warning that we should not avert our gaze from them. It is Martin V. Melosi at his best.
Dr. Simone M. Müller is Project Director and Principal Investigator of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group “Hazardous Travels: Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy” at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. She works at the intersection of globalization studies, economic and social history, and environmental humanities. Simone is speaker of the Young ZiF (Center for Interdisciplinary Research) of the University of Bielefeld and deputy speaker of the international doctorate program “Rethinking Environment”.