Tuesday night at Metropolitan Exchange, John McLaughlin, Director of Environmental Services for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, presented the lecture “Restoring Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania and Fountain Landfills” as part of the Freshkills Park Talks lecture series. The landfills – on Jamaica Bay, near JFK – were opened in the ’50s, closed in the ’80s, and capped and rehabilitated in the ’00s.  While they look like pristine parkland today, they represent a dark chapter in New York’s environmental history: both sites are listed as Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites, which means that beneath their surfaces lie unknown quantities of toxins like benzene and dioxin.

Much of McLaughlin’s talk was Landfill 101: he described the type of membrane used to cap the toxins (40mm plastic), the varieties of topsoil chosen to cover the cap, and the plant species used to repopulate the site. He described the difference between landfills receiving municipal solid waste (like Freshkills), and those receiving more insidious toxins, like Pennsylvania and Fountain.  What lies inside a landfill determines its capping and effluent strategies, but interestingly, it also determines the site’s potential for eventual reintegration into larger sociological and political networks. For instance, public access to the sites is currently a flashpoint between DEP and representatives of East New York. The former want to make sure the site is absolutely safe before opening to the public; the latter want to secure open space for one of Brooklyn’s most park-deprived communities.

I found McLaughlin’s definition of ecological restoration salient: “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded.” I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to urban ‘ecosystems’ like Detroit or the South Bronx – different kinds of sites where designers’ efforts are similarly needed to restore damaged ecologies, via a delicate intervention strategy like that described by McLaughlin. Landfills are simply the most egregious of past misdeeds, and therefore symbolize the daunting scale of our challenges.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.