Fresh Kills, by Martin V. Melosi (introduction)

MARTIN V. MELOSI

A HISTORY OF CONSUMING AND DISCARDING IN NEW YORK CITY

INTRODUCTION

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resh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City centers on the mundane yet profound problem of solid waste disposal in the modern metropolis.1 Waste from mass consumption was a serious dilemma for cities in the twentieth century—and into the twenty-first. This is true whether we are talking about fossil-fuel emissions and climate change or accumulating tons of refuse from discarded goods and not knowing what to do with them. Societies in both the developed and developing worlds have faced the challenge of pursuing economic growth and, at the same time, coping with the unwanted residue of material accumulation. The rise of Greater New York City and its decision to build Fresh Kills Landfill offer a supreme example of the dilemma of consuming in recent years. Fresh Kills was a consequence of mass consumption and the embodiment of massive waste.

New York City’s story about disposal is told through the history of a monumental structure, the 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, which is one of the largest human-engineered formations in the world. It is located along the Fresh Kills Estuary in the northwestern part of Staten Island on what had been extensive salt marsh. The landfill was opened in 1948, but its story begins several decades before the consolidation of New York City (1898). Tracking the transformation of the site and the disposal practices in Gotham in the mid-tolate nineteenth century explains how Staten Island’s land uses changed well before the landfill was laid out and what other disposal technologies fell out of favor.

The teeming boroughs making up the city first emptied their vast amounts of accumulated wastes into nearby watercourses, including the Atlantic Ocean,

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and also onto land throughout the city. The municipal government also began experimenting with incinerators in 1885 and reduction plants in 1895. Eventually the city delivered its refuse to Staten Island (only a short scow trip from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx), which was neither as populous nor as economically productive as most of its neighbors. Refuse traveled from where many people lived and worked to where they did not (at least initially), making the landfill at Fresh Kills a justifiable destination for things no longer of value to the people living in the swelling metropolis. The landfill served as a primary disposal facility for Greater New York’s solid waste from 1948 to 2001.

For Staten Islanders, the endless citywide creation and delivery of thousands of tons of garbage and trash each day was a curse, leaving its citizens to wonder why “the Dump” abutting their homes and neighborhoods had been designated a sacrifice zone.

Fresh Kills reopened briefly in late 2001 through June 2002 to provide a receiving point for human remains and building rubble from the destroyed Twin Towers after the September 11 attack (and it opened up again after Hurricane Sandy in 2012). What had been a notorious disposal site of unwanted trash now also became a cemetery for the remains of many people who had lost their lives in the nation’s worst terrorist tragedy. Today the landfill is the heart of a mammoth reclamation project to construct an expansive parkland known as Freshkills Park, three times the size of Central Park.

Using the history of Fresh Kills Landfill as a focal point, Fresh Kills tells the intersecting histories of New York City, Staten Island, and the challenges of waste management. The long timeline and attention to the landscape is crucial. Observers most often visualize Fresh Kills Landfill from the back end of its history, that is, from the gigantic mounds of smelly waste spreading all along Staten Island’s North Shore, or, more positively, as the raw material for a grand park. Such a vantage point gives a sense of inevitability to the state of the place.

The pre- and posthistory of the landfill, however, suggests otherwise. The land upon which it was built was a salt marsh used for many generations by Lenape American Indians and European immigrants for growing salt hay and for hunting and fishing. About one hundred years before the landfill began, the city placed a quarantine station and a supporting medical complex on Staten Island to distance infected sailors and others from New York’s main population. During World War I, the city sited an unwanted waste disposal plant on the very spot where the landfill would be built several decades later.

This backstory particularly highlights Staten Island’s long period of alienation and the sense of its citizenry that their borough was regularly being exploited by the core city and that their homes were valued differently than those on Manhattan and elsewhere in Greater New York. Over the years, much of New York City’s marshland had been transformed into “useful” or taxable land or into various dumps and landfills. On Staten Island, marshland

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destruction led to the creation of an enormous waste site. For those who despised it, Fresh Kills Landfill would always be “the Dump.” For those who viewed it as a necessary evil, it was a sanitary landfill. There was nothing ordained about Fresh Kills as a disposal facility, other than the city’s will to build it. Why it became so and how it evolved into something else is at the heart of this book.

New York City’s hunt for an ultimate disposal option is the consequence of more than rational decision making. Timing, circumstance, options, impulse, and accident are the stuff of history. Sanitation has always been and will always be political, and politics as much as anything else led to Fresh Kills. The landfill also is a supreme example of the serious consequences of massive environmental transformation; it is an altered landscape and socialscape that affects not only Staten Island but the whole city—and beyond.

Fresh Kills is also as much symbol as site. The space that the landfill occupies was transformed from an apparent marginal landscape of salt marsh into a wastescape and then into an ecoscape or reimagined park space. The landfill is a tangible reminder of how human habits and societal behaviors are caught between material wants and valueless remnants. Stepping back from its remarkable history, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles looked upon Fresh Kills as “a social sculpture,” a reflection of our material culture, our consumer practices, and our sense of value and worthlessness.

Why should we care what a landfill—even a gigantic one like Fresh Kills— tells us about our history? Most obviously, consumption and waste are inextricably connected, but that relationship is much more complex and broadly significant than simple cause and effect. Consumption of goods rarely if ever results in nothing left over. Material goods generate residue, which must be reused in some form or disposed of in some way. Even in an era of greater environmental consciousness, the lion’s share of waste is discarded. In modern cities in particular, the individuals who discard feel no further responsibility for their waste, are usually not the ones who decide how and where to dispose of it, and ultimately relinquish all ownership of it. Historically, the dilemma of consumption (or consuming) needs to be understood as a triangular relationship among the consumption of goods, the creation of waste, and disposal (often meaning place). Recently, efforts to alter this relationship call for reducing consumption, putting responsibility on manufacturers to create products that do not have one-time use only, encouraging reuse and recycling, and more carefully monitoring disposal. So far, the aspirations for Zero Waste remain just that—aspirations.

Putting Fresh Kills and New York’s disposal history at the heart of this book offers an important case study beyond the “gee whiz” value of the site. Production of massive quantities of waste, certainly from the nineteenth century onward, was linked to finding a workable disposal option. The meaning of “workable” constantly changed. Sometimes it simply implied “out of sight, out

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of mind.” Often it entailed inconveniencing or harming those unable to muster sufficient resistance against it. More recently it required (or was impelled) to consider potential environmental risks. For much of New York City’s history, major portions of the waste stream were merely stuff no longer wanted.

“Clean fill” and construction rubble were used to create new land, some organic material might be reused as animal feed, and recycling efforts came and went— and came back. The immutable connections between consumption and waste took time to recognize, let alone address, especially the squandering of natural resources and the recognition that production processes affect what and how materials can either be reused or discarded.

Fresh Kills is a dramatic example of consumption gone wild. But the landfill also sits at the third point in the triangular relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place). As a location for disposal, it created a political storm between the city proper and Staten Island; it raised the specter of social injustice for its border neighborhoods (despite the fact that they primarily were white); and it exposed environmental risks from methane gas, leachate, and other substances.

If this book only told the story of Fresh Kills as a disposal site and as part of the chain of consumption, waste, and disposal, it would be useful but incomplete. The events that led to the creation of the landfill certainly inform our understanding about the massive problem of solid waste, the decision-making processes influencing disposal practices, and the environmental and social implications of creating a refuse sacrifice zone. But history is a temporal discipline, and it requires attention to temporal matters. The construction and use of Fresh Kills (1948–2001) is only a part of the story of those 2,200 acres of Staten Island. To appreciate the landfill’s place in the history of Staten Island and New York is, of course, to understand it in context. But each phase in the history of the site—from salt marsh to park—evokes powerful memories of what the site had been before the landfill, memories of the landfill itself (a nagging reality of vast discards left behind), and aspirations for a changing role for the space once it became a park. Fresh Kill’s history is cumulative, not episodic.

Fresh Kills as a transient space and bundle of memories adds layers of significance to the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place).

In any city or country, the generation of waste is a vast physical, social, and political occurrence with long-term implications. The book uses Fresh Kills to impress upon us the broad consequences of wasting and wastefulness but also to make clear that the landfill was not a static land use. Fresh Kills contains multitudes: narratives about seeking a waste sink, political rivalries, NIMBYism and social justice, pollution and toxic threats, land use and planning, terrorism and remembering, and restoration ecology and park building. The connection among consumption, waste, and place is essential to explain how

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materiality and its effects can help broaden our understanding of urban culture.

A “waste history” of this kind exposes a different way to explore a city’s past, in this case New York City.

Since the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal (place) is the centerpiece of Fresh Kills, it might be useful to explore these concepts a little further—for the sake of clarity, not abstraction.

CONSUMPTION As a 1999 study on consuming cultures rightly stated, “We consume to live; yet we also consume to do much more than just live.” It also argued that “consumption is one of the basic ways in which society is structured and organized, usually unequally, sometimes incredibly so.”2 Any generalization about consumption needs to take into account important disparities separating the rich and the poor throughout the history of the United States and elsewhere. The Industrial Revolution did a great deal to restructure our consuming culture and to promote urban growth. Until about the 1870s most Americans were not yet wide-ranging consumers; instead, they spent most of what they earned on food, clothing, and housing. By the late nineteenth century, however, a new consumer society was emerging in which the average person could aspire to—if not always achieve—upward mobility. Among the growing middle class, especially, the new consumerism was most obvious.3 Rising wages or farm income opened up the possibility for a larger number of Americans to acquire more material goods. By 1900, 65 percent the country’s population lived and worked in and around the industrial centers in the Northeast and Upper Midwest—the so-called Rust Belt—where factory and office jobs were most plentiful. The oft-repeated observation that a new middle class was rising at the time was borne out by the changing character of work.

In the 1870s, 52 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture, 21 percent in manufacturing and mining, and 27 percent in other fields. By the 1890s, 41 percent worked in agriculture, 22 percent in production, and 37 percent in services. This pattern continued until the eve of World War II, when only 21 percent were farmers and service employees reached 54 percent.4 Industrial capitalism ramped up the mass production of goods and expedited mass consumption. Mass production through factory assembly lines increased worker productivity, made consumer goods affordable to many workers, and led to a consumer revolution. Into the twentieth century, increased consumerism was spurred by the new business of mass advertising. Economic growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was not a steady climb, and boom-and-bust cycles took their toll.5 Marxists and other

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critics of capitalism argued that consumption was “the stalking horse of capitalism,” which focused on profits rather than the social good and led to a variety of societal and environmental ills beyond the undulations of the marketplace.6 While such an assessment might give too big a role to consumerism in the overall impact of the capitalist system, consumption practices and patterns were related directly to a growing waste problem in the United States beginning in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like Europe, the United States in its industrial era was confronted with huge amounts of refuse, with two distinct dimensions. One was tethered to the physical distress caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and primitive methods of collection and disposal; the other was linked to the rising affluence of the middle class, an abundance of resources, and consumerism, which continued into America’s postindustrial era.7 In a period of mass production, structural changes in the consumer market encouraged acquisition of all kinds of goods. New factories produced massive amounts of primary materials, such as pig iron, steel, railroad freight cars, and cottonseed oil. But consumer goods (such as toothpaste, chewing gum, safety razors, and breakfast cereal) also became readily available to many people who until recently had had no access to them, and the practice of wearing homemade clothes was being challenged by ready-mades. The cheap cotton-clothing industry, for example, was a leader in promoting industrial capitalism, beginning in the early nineteenth century. New York City was the center of this industry. In 1860, it had 1,286 companies making or retailing clothing. Other cities, such as New Orleans (982 firms), Philadelphia (560), Cincinnati (345), and San Francisco (271), were clothing centers as well. Mass food production, such as meat from Chicago and flour from Minneapolis, changed eating habits. For those living at a distance from the new department stores and retail shops, the Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogues offered mail-order access to the new world of manufactured goods.8 The historian Susan Strasser notes, “Americans everywhere and of all classes began to eat, drink, clean with, wear, and sit on products made in factories.”9 Over time, the goods produced in American factories and imported from abroad would become more diverse and technically more intricate (such as automobiles, televisions, computers, and innumerable plastic products) and the discards more plentiful and complex. Consumer demand was propped up by frequent model and style changes, not only in cars and clothes but eventually in cell phones and other electronic products. “Planned obsolescence” of washers and driers, refrigerators, and dishwashers kept consumers coming back for more and newer products. As the United States moved from an industrial to a service economy in the mid-twentieth century, changes in consumer trends were not easy to keep up with. And at times, critics and reformers pushed back against buying sprees to question materialism, to assert the dangers of a “throwaway society,” or to assert “Small Is Beautiful.”10

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The home was not the only “consumption space.” New goods and services were becoming available at an array of major sites, such as restaurants, parks, festivals, sports arenas, art galleries, cultural centers, and, later, cinema complexes, shopping malls, and theme parks. Aside from offering social interaction, arts and culture, and just plain fun, such consumption spaces became important mechanisms for accessing more and different commodities.11 While the discards of the nineteenth century in the various consumption spaces were largely food wastes, wood and coal ash, rubbish, and horse manure, the more recent waste stream included a mix of hard-to-replace and recyclable materials—as well as a variety of toxic substances. Of all the current discards, paper, plastics, and aluminum have increased most rapidly. In addition, the collection of these wastes has been made more difficult not only by the volume and composition of discarded materials but also because of the large populations to be served and the greater territory that sanitation workers were required to cover.

By World War I if not before, many Americans had come to view some goods as necessities, not luxuries. Aspiring for greater upward economic mobility and a desire to enhance one’s standard of living brought with it a demand for conveniences like indoor plumbing. At least by the end of World War II, an automobile and a modest house were the status symbols of the rising middle class.

In 1920, only 26 percent of households owned a vehicle; by 2000, that number was 89 percent. Having electricity, running water, and multiple appliances was expected.12 American affluence was widely envied throughout the world, even though not everyone shared in the bounty, and poverty was far from ended in the United States. With affluence came the distinction of discarding more. In the early twenty-first century, the United States consumes about onethird of the world’s resources, producing 50 percent more solid waste per person than any other Western economy. Americans discard more than 1,600 pounds of refuse per person per year, or 4.5 pounds each day.13

WASTE Turning the discussion on its head: examining the waste stream is a good way to understand systems of production and consumption.14 After all, wasting is an inevitable part of life and an integral part of consuming. The urban planner Kevin Lynch stated, “Wasting pervades the living system. Organisms appropriate substance and energy, use what they need, and then expire or dispose of what they cannot use.”15 For humans, the process is a little more problematic, as the journalist Heather Rogers observed: “Consumption lies at the heart of American life and economic health, and intrinsic to consumption is garbage.

Such high levels of waste are the product not of any natural law or strange primordial impulse but of history, of social forces.”16 Waste, also, is subject to

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moral judgment. The sociologist Gay Hawkins argued that “Waste makes us feel bad, its presence disgusts and horrifies us, it wrecks everything.” There is a tendency, therefore, to place blame on the disposed object and not on the one doing the disposing.17 Scholars and philosophers of all stripes have expended much energy on trying to explain exactly what waste is and if it has value—materially or symbolically. Garbage, trash, rubbish, offal, refuse, junk, debris, clutter, litter, rejectamenta: solid waste goes by many names. In the natural world, waste is simply part of the life cycle; it is a change of substance returned to the physical environment in a different form. In human civilization, waste has an entirely different role and connotation. While humans are not alone in waste making, they are the only species that passes judgment on it. Probably the best known of these thinkers is the British social scientist Michael Thompson, through his book Rubbish Theory, first published in 1979 (revised in 2017). Thompson believes that “we need a theory of people and stuff—particularly now that we are faced with seemingly intractable discard-generated problems such as climate change—and that . . . is precisely what rubbish theory gives us.”18 Thompson’s basic premise is that there are two cultural categories that are “socially imposed” on objects—the durable and the transient. The former (for example, antique urns) have “increasing value and infinite expected lifespans”; the latter (for example, milk cartons) have “decreasing value and finite expected lifespans.” The transient, however, has the possibility of rebounding into the durable category (an old postcard perhaps?). Included in “rubbish” is the item that falls neither into the durable or transient category but, rather than reaching zero value and zero expected life, usually “continues to exist in a timeless and valueless limbo where at some later date (if it has not by that time turned, or been made, into dust) it has the chance of being discovered . . . and successfully transferred to durability.” Thompson concludes that “in order to study the social control of value, we have to study rubbish.”19 For the purposes of Fresh Kills, Thompson’s conclusion that “the boundary between rubbish and nonrubbish is not fixed but moves in response to social pressures” highlights the difficulty of what disposal actually accomplishes.20 In its typical context, “to consume” gives the impression of finality, that is, completing the process of acquiring some material thing and using it up. In many cases, the lifespan of waste is longer than its useful phase. The sociologist John Scanlan is right when he states that “what we consume never really disappears.”21 Some societies, past and present, used many goods until they were worn out, but that is much less the case in industrial and postindustrial America, where worn-out items are discarded along with no-longer-desirable goods.

Even food items rarely get wholly consumed.22 Society is faced with several, albeit not wholly satisfactory options in dealing with waste: ignore it, store it, sell it, give it away, break it down, combine it with something else, or reuse as

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much of it as possible. In Thompson’s view, and that of others, society assigns a value to waste (which sometimes changes), and that value dictates its disposal or reuse.23 For New York City, as with most other cities, the chief aim of refuse disposal for much of its history was unburdening the streets, alleyways, and vacant lands of piles of rubbish for the sake of mobility, safety, and health. The advent of the modern environmental movement shifted attention to resource recovery and recycling but did not appreciably change disposal practices for what might not be reused. Today New York City ships most of its refuse out of state to other people’s landfills and to other people’s incinerators, although efforts to recycle and reuse materials have increased. The debate over what we throw away and what we waste, nevertheless, goes on.

DISPOSAL/PLACE The third part of the consumption-waste-disposal (place) system as developed in this book speaks explicitly to the central role of landscape in understanding Fresh Kills. First, it suggests the importance of Fresh Kills Landfill as a disposal choice for the City of New York, and, second, it discusses how the 2,200-acre space shaped and shapes the history of Staten Island in particular (the evolution of landscape into wastescape into ecoscape). In broad terms, as the sociologist Kevin Hetherington points out, “Disposal . . . is not primarily about waste but about placing. It is as much a spatial as a temporal category.”24 Sites like Fresh Kills Landfill are spaces within spaces, trash footprints, and areas of waste displacement. Even as a landfill it faced constant change given the ceaseless need to deal not only with great volumes of refuse but also with a waste stream that frequently altered in composition and environmental impact.

Landfills operate as long-term storage facilities but are also “consumption junctions” where the remnants of consuming merely reach a way station, not a final resting place. They are part of a provisional process because they frequently do not remain a landfill forever.25 The landfill is characterized as an infrastructure having a mediating role between nature and city in dealing with waste, but its permanence or impermanence as a land use is decided by a variety of objectives, desires, and aspirations for the space.26 Landfills like Fresh Kills also are archives of material and memories—collectively the accumulation of real and imagined pieces of, in this case, every borough.27 Some have treated landfills as “antilandscapes,” that is, material places that cannot sustain life, or places that have become “culturally sterile or metaphorically invisible.” But this may be true only if landfills are examined in a limited time span. Their place in the consumer-waste-disposal cycle is rarely permanent or unchanged, but their long-term significance can be linked to an altogether

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different identity.28 As the geographer Anna Storm states, “There are wounded landscapes that are difficult to heal. However, the physical scars are also part of the stories that are the fabric of heritage, and these landscapes of waste may reemerge as new landscapes of memory and community identity that are directed toward the future.”29 The site’s past also is a defining feature. In this case, Staten Island’s vast marshland existing before the landfill is central to understanding the borough’s environmental and human history and how that was changed by Fresh Kills Landfill.

Landfills as disposal sites make it clear that place matters. Heather Rogers hits on a critical point: “There’s a reason landfills are tucked away on the edge of town, in otherwise un-traveled terrain, camouflaged by hydroseeded, neatly tiered slopes. If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions.”30 On Staten Island people asked difficult questions. Ultimately, the eyesore could no longer be overlooked by others in New York City. Its scale was impossible to ignore, which was much more dramatic than the dozens of other dumps and landfills that had populated Gotham over the years.

But Rogers’s interpretation of a landfill’s location is only part of a bigger issue about landfills in the landscape. As a highly engineered space, it bears the mark of a building and design tradition that more than hints at the lengths that city leaders go to to dispose of the city’s waste.31 Landfills, incinerators, and reduction plants are elaborate and intricate capital-intensive technologies created to hide, destroy, or remake wastes, with little concern about how that waste came to be. They are marvelous inventions, but they were not developed to stem the tide of consumption; they are only reminders that the residuals from consumption need to be tolerated. In many ways, recovering value from landfills in particular required turning the wastescape into something else. As the landscape architect Mira Engler asserts, in turning it into a park and golf course, “the dump was redeemed, the repugnance covered, and the bad memory erased. . . . At times, taking a utilitarian approach, the land is assigned some recreation use to recover its value and add a sense of communal worth.”32 In the case of Fresh Kills, at least, the recovery value of constructing a park neither eliminated the memory of the landfill nor restored the marshland’s ecological integrity. The specters of 9/11 continued to haunt it as well. Fresh Kills as a landfill was one particular iteration for that particular piece of Staten Island real estate, but it hardly seemed so at the time. The dump would always be the Dump, but the site’s meaning and value would not so much change as be modified by the powerful forces of history represented by the Twin Tower disaster and the building of Freshkills Park. The landfill was never really an isolated space, hiding the discards of a great city. Its recognition grew out of its relationship not simply to Staten Island but to Greater New York and the surrounding area—and also to the world of waste and wastefulness. Staten Island paid

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the price for its location—as did, for example, neighborhoods near transfer stations—but eventually the forgotten borough could reap the benefit of the promised Freshkills Park.

The story of Fresh Kills is about the dilemma of consuming, to be sure, but is its future linked more to the resurrection and preservation of a natural setting or to a human artifact encasing memories of generations of New Yorkers?

* * * The backstory of Staten Island, the building and closing of Fresh Kills Landfill, and the future of Freshkills Park are parts of a sweeping history that deals with the life of one dump, albeit a very large and important one, and its broader implications.

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss New York City as an island city that was land poor but economically and demographically dynamic, where outlets for waste from mass consumption faced severe limits and the mounting piles of refuse created the city’s first major “garbage problem.” Chapters 3 through 6 address the backstory of New Yorkers, Staten Island, and Fresh Kills before the landfill. Chapter 3 provides a glimpse of early Staten Island and also the notorious “Quarantine War” in the 1850s, when locals burned down the quarantine station and adjacent buildings located on the island for fear of future epidemics of yellow fever. The event was a precursor to other mainland incursions on the “Forgotten Borough.” Chapter 4 relates the “Garbage War” before World War I, in which the building of a refuse plant—on the site where Fresh Kills Landfill would be constructed several decades later—set off a major controversy. Chapters 5 and 6 return to New York City’s struggles with disposal, especially the experiments with incineration and the turn toward landfills.

Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of Fresh Kills Landfill, especially through the machinations of the “master builder” Robert Moses. Chapters 8 through 14 treat the history of Fresh Kills Landfill and New York City’s chronic battles over disposal. Chapter 15 discusses Staten Island’s rebellion through secession to protest its years as a sacrifice zone. Chapters 16 and 17 take on the decision to close the landfill and the debates over what to do next. Chapter 18 introduces the tragedy of September 11 and how it intertwined with the history of Fresh Kills.

And chapters 19 and 20 transition to Freshkills Park and the Department of Sanitation’s efforts to change its disposal practices in a post–Fresh Kills world.

As a whole, the book is more than a study of Fresh Kills, but the book’s story could not be told without it.

Fresh Kills—a monumental 2,200-acre site on Staten Island—was once the world’s largest landfill. It closed in 2001 but after the 9/11 attacks reopened briefly to receive human remains and rubble from the destroyed Twin Towers. Today, a mammoth reclamation project is transforming the landfill into an expansive park. Martin V. Melosi provides a comprehensive chronicle of Fresh Kills that offers new insights into the growth and development of New York City and the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal.

Fresh Kills unites environmental, political, and cultural history to offer a reflection on material culture, consumer practices, and perceptions of value and worthlessness.

“Fresh Kills is excellent in many ways—clarity of prose, strength of narration, depth of research, and command of the literature. Melosi is one of the finest urban historians working today, and he is, although this will sound like an unintended slight, the premiere historian of garbage. He possesses as thorough a knowledge of the many relevant secondary literatures as anyone. One could not find a more appropriate scholar to take up this topic.”

—DAVID STRADLING , author of The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State

“Fresh Kills frames Staten Island’s iconic landfill as not just a repository for solid waste but also a monument to consumer culture. This is an immensely readable and valuable book by a distinguished scholar of environmental history.”

—MICHAEL RAWSON , author of Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston

“Melosi tells the story of the dump that ate New York with panache, rescuing this erstwhile salt marsh from the late-night comedians and, in the process, telling us something deeply important and troubling about postwar American capitalism.”

—TED STEINBERG , author of Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York

“One of the pioneers of urban environmental history gives us a meticulously researched and sweeping narrative of New York, Staten Island, and the landfill known as Fresh Kills, revealing a seamy underside of modern prosperity, mass consumption, and New York politics. The maps and illustrations are marvelous.”

—J. R. M C NEILL , author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

MARTIN V. MELOSI is Cullen Professor Emeritus of History and founding director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. His many books include The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000) and Atomic Age America (2013).

Cover image: Digital composite. © Diane Cook and Fotosearch/Getty Images and Len Jenshel/Getty Images Cover design: Lisa Hamm Printed in the U.S.A.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

ISBN: 978-0-231-18948-4