Fresh Kills Park

For half a century, Fresh Kills, on Staten Island, stood as a sign of all that was wrong with New York, with America, with humanity itself. The largest landfill in the world and reputedly the largest manmade structure in history, Fresh Kills contains about 150 million tons of garbage.

Closed in 2001, then temporarily reopened to receive and sort the wreckage of the World Trade Center, Fresh Kills is in the midst of an incredible transformation. The largest park undertaking in New York since the nineteenth century aims to turn Fresh Kills into a 2200-acre natural playground and preserve.

Though the park won't be complete for another 30 years, the city recently hosted a sneak peak, allowing visitors to see the progress being made. (They're putting on more tours in November.) A sophisticated soil and plastic infrastructure sits atop the trash, while wells collect the gas created by decomposition and pump it to a purification station where methane is extracted and sold for energy uses. The landscape is already being colonized by muskrats, deer, hawks, and pheasants, and the next generation of bipedal New Yorkers will gambol about its wetlands and meadows, canoe on its creeks, and wonder what their great-great-grandparents had been thinking.