Fountain Avenue Landfill, Zion and Graham

Please forgive any copyright violation in posting this detail of Uli Seit's beautiful photo of Manhattan viewed through Ailanthus saplings growing in an urban "prairie" planted where was once only landfill. The theft is a crime of passion.

Kenneth Chang's NYT article was a thrill to come across, I didn't know anything about this Fountain Avenue Landfill, just East of Canarsie, or its reclamation. In the article Leslie Sauer, a landscape architect who had a hand in the landfill's transformation into soon to be parkland makes the toothsome comment "the idea of mowing landfills in lunacy." There's a line to savor. The Fountain Avenue landfill's toxic pileup was capped with clay and plastic before being coated with enough soil to root a tree. It's plastic surgery but it ain't nothing. We of course have to thank Staten Island's Fresh Kills and now the landfills of Ohio and Virginia where our 50,000 pounds of trash per day wind up for the space that allows this special new jewel of coastal Brooklyn.

That is until we become experts in how to simply produce less trash. I for one have a long way to go. Like many I like my goods packaged inside of packages inside of packages, with bows and ribbons and wires to make sure the little doo dah hasn't come loose while bumping around inside the delivery truck. Slowly, some day soon, I'd like to make the move towards naked consumerism, not so much shopping naked as allowing more nakedness for my stuff, or at least less non-biodegradable buffering. I'll just carry my baguette, pineapple, dozen or so donuts down the street in my arms.

I found a very cool childrens book recently in Park Slope, the Plant Sitter by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham (1959), who brought us all the serious joy of Harry the Dirty Dog and No Roses of Harry. (If you want to destroy my sweater...) Below is the page when the boy who has become the neighborhood plant sitter, bringing a forest of plants into his parent's house, dreams that the plants grow so much that the walls fall off his house and the plants manage to keep the house's shape. If the core of the greenbuilding core gets their way, that may someday happen to the NYC skyline, and I hope I'm around to see it. Also makes me wonder if Rachel Whiteread might have read Zion as a child.