Decline in Design on Fresh Kills Bridge

One of the major north-south routes on Staten Island is Richmond Avenue, which crosses Fresh Kills at the point where the stream leaves LaTourette Park and enters the former landfill that is Freshkills Park. The bridge here has a long history, going through four phases in design.

The stretch of Richmond Avenue at Fresh Kills resembles a highway and the bridge is easy to miss as one speeds through the salt marsh. The current bridge was built in the 1980s, a concrete and steel fixed crossing. Some maps have the stream here as Richmond Creek, the name used for Fresh Kills further upstream where it descends from the hills of the Staten Island Greenbelt.

Brookfield Park, Staten Island

On December 12, 2017, NYC Parks celebrated its 30,000th acre with the opening of Brookfield Park on Staten Island. This 287-acre property is a former landfill transformed into a hilly prairie landscape overlooking Richmond Creek. For the purposes of this blog, I traveled to this new park in search of the brook for which Brookfield may be named.

A day after its official opening this 258-acre park still had an “authorized personnel only” kind of feel. Not too many bikes or joggers to be found here on a snowy morning.

Fresh Kills at Queens Museum

This past Friday, I was invited to speak about my book before the annual investors conference for the 22nd Annual Investors conference of the NYC Municipal Water Finance Authority. It took place at Queens Museum, which coincided with Maintenance Art, an exhibit on the ecology, history, and future of Fresh Kills by Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

The central piece of the exhibit was a model of Landing, an overlooks inside the dump-turned-park that will offer visitors a view of the city’s largest naturalistic landscape. What’s an architecture piece from Staten Island park doing at the Queens Museum?

Willow Brook on Bradley, Staten Island

Among the hidden waterways on Staten Island, Willow Brook is so obscure that a Google Street View isn’t good enough to tell the difference between an overgrown vacant lot and an overgrown vacant lot with the sound of a brook flowing beneath the vegetation. The only way to find Willow Brook is to see it in person.

 

I had my encounter with a segment of Willow Brook while traveling down Bradley Avenue on the way to Greenbelt Nature Center, where I was conducting an inspection.