Down in the Dumps

Over Easter week, while our friends were taking their offspring scuba diving near Maui and helicopter skiing in Sun Valley, we found ourselves chugging across New York Harbor on a ferry to Staten Island, home of the world’s largest garbage dump.

There were some young people about. Twenty-three high school students had been dragooned to the Fresh Kills Landfill by their teacher, Joy Iceithline, who was a cross between a rabid environmentalist and a becrazed cheerleader:

“We’re the first high school from all of Manhattan to come here,” Iceithline told the students as their yellow bus headed into the bowels of the dump. “We’re gonna make Seward Park High School the best!”

We wondered about that connection, but nevertheless joined the students on their tour of the repository of all household trash that we and 7,333,253 other New Yorkers thoughtlessly dispose of every day. That’s 13,000 tons a day of dropped meatballs, dirty diapers and soda cans from all five boroughs.

Tours of the landfill were created and promoted, complete with color brochures, as New York’s latest tourist attraction--at least for a while.

“Look, people, look at what you produce every single day,” Iceithline continued, her voice booming as the bus idled in front of a 150-foot hill of garbage artfully covered with dirt and landscaping.

“Isn’t it disgusting?” she goaded, trying to whip up some new enthusiasm for recycling.

Since the landfill opened in 1948, the city has dumped 100 million tons of trash on this extraordinary piece of New York real estate. (To get a feel for just how big this place is, you need only know that at 3,000 acres it’s the same size as Los Angeles International Airport or four times the size of Disneyland.) Once a flat and somewhat scenic wildlife sanctuary, on the snowy April day of our tour the landfill, now almost half full, looked more like the bunny slopes of Sun Valley.

But reality asserted itself soon enough.

In a fit of restlessness one of the students began fiddling with a window, eventually opening it up all the way. Despite daily spraying of pine oil deodorant, the combined odor of methane gas and rotting rubbish had an arresting affect.

“Oooooh, my jacket’s changing colors from the stink,” moaned Angie Peng, a 15-year-old sophomore. Another student pulled his knitted cap over his nose.

And then we came upon the so-called active bank where a flock of sea gulls was dive-bombing for snacks while trying to stay ahead of several bulldozers that were lifting, dumping and squaring off thousands of tons of broken-open plastic bags of garbage. The odor was breathtaking, yet Iceithline didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy lobbying Dave Hendrickson, a former sanitation truck driver who was put through tour-guide school to qualify for this assignment, to let the students get off the bus and walk about. A student from her Environmental Club had even brought yellow rubber gloves in anticipation of mucking about the muck.

“I want them to walk through it, to get the feeling,” Iceithline protested when Hendrickson insisted that it was too dangerous around all the heavy equipment. Later she was mollified--and even took a group picture--when we were permitted to walk near the dock area where 103 barges deliver garbage around the clock.

Angie seemed to have only a passing interest in this and other sites. Yet neither the bumpy bus ride nor the choking stench dampened her enthusiasm for eating. Constantly. During the first hour of the tour she managed to ingest one apple, two bananas, several Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies and some kind of pecan roll that clearly emerged from a school vending machine.

“I forgot to pack a lunch,” she said, smiling as she begged a second apple off a friend.

It was only during the question and answer period that Angie perked up, inquiring of Hendrickson how much garbage the average New Yorker contributes to Fresh Kills every day.

“You know,” said Hendrickson, clearly dumbfounded but happy that the student minds were churning, “that’s a great question and I have to write it down because it keeps coming up and I want to have an answer next time.”

*

As it turned out, there might not be many next times.

Shortly after our visit and after a report about the city’s tour-the-dump campaign appeared in a local paper, the New York Times, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became something of a Fresh Kill-joy.

The mayor, who is quite beholden to Staten Islanders for getting him elected in 1993, concluded that it was insensitive to people who live with the problems of the dump every day to make it a tourist attraction. His decision apparently came after Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari complained that the locals were outraged that the landfill, which they had tried for decades to have closed down, was now being showcased. Staten Island’s member of the City Council even wrote a scathing letter to Lucian Chalfen, the Sanitation Department spokesman, calling him a “bureaucratic snake oil salesman.”

Chalfen, who came up with the idea of the tours, explained that the Sanitation Department only began offering tours--and even produced the brochure--as a way to buff up the dump’s image and improve relations with its neighbors on Staten Island, which has such a chip on its shoulder about being a hick compared to such celebrity boroughs as Manhattan and Brooklyn that it tried unsuccessfully last year to secede from New York City.

The effort to turn the landfill into the Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building of Staten Island somehow didn’t work.

“It’s bad enough we have to suffer with the landfill at all,” Molinari told the local paper, noting that he has been trying for years to have it closed down, and that as an assemblyman in the 1940s, his father tried to keep it from being opened. “But when people learned that with all we have on Staten Island that is of real interest to tourists, this is what was being promoted, they took it as a real slap in the face.”

*

There is the expectation that the landfill will be completely full within 15 years or so if New Yorkers keep chucking out their old sneakers and takeout cartons at the current rate. In the past, a dump in Queens was turned into the grounds for the 1964 World’s Fair and later a park.

Our suggestions for Fresh Kills’ future use:

* Capture that scent and New York City could reverse its indebtedness by marketing a new cologne called, perhaps, “Eau de Last Week’s Tuna.”

* Turn some of the refuse into fashion products and let Fresh Kills give Timberland a run for its money.

* Bubble it over and create the Fresh Kills Tennis Club.

* Build Fresh Kills Academy, an on-site environmental training school. Already, there are dozens of academic studies underway on such lofty topics as how to grow shrubbery in garbage-rich soil.

Angie doesn’t understand why all the worry.

“Turn the place into a zoo,” she suggested, now well into her third apple and truly energized. “And then ship all the garbage to space.”

“That’s typical humans,” said teacher Iceithline. “Make our problems somebody else’s.”

“Who else’s?” Angie said. “Space is the definition of space.”