Blog Posts by Subject: Urban Affairs

I am at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. According to plate 78 of my map atlas—Williams Perris’s 1857 “Maps of the City of New York”—the massive (2) block long stone structure at the southwest corner of this Manhattan intersection is not the grand Beaux Arts NYPL Schwarzman Building but the Distributing Reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct Department.

The United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division estimated that by the end of 2008, for the first time in human history, the Earth's population was more than half concentrated into urban areas. 

Robert A Caro’s tome The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a thick, unwieldy book at 1344 pages. It sits on my shelf with yellowed pages. I bought it shortly after I moved to New York City 30 years ago. I enjoy history and learned after I moved here that Robert Moses was an important piece of the NYC history puzzle. The book upon first reading was lost to me. I had no real understanding of New York City at that point and Robert Moses’ story was simply too complex and out of context for me. When I think about the enormity of Caro’s book I think of the enormity of the personage of Robert Moses himself. I have started The Power Broker a couple of 

In the next coming weeks I will be hosting a series of programs on the subject of NYC sanitation. Below is a post devoted to the first program Gotham and Its Garbage: A History of Public Waste, Public Health and the Department of Sanitation. A Slide Lecture with Robin Nagle Ph.D.

Yesterday...

...and today!

OK, so this is the thing about which just about all Staten Islanders, no matter what their background or politics, have over the years been least proud. The Fresh Kills Landfill (or as we used to call it, “the dump,”) closed on March 22, 2001, certainly in part as a reward from then mayor Rudy Giuliani to Staten Island for its political support.

The dump opened up in 1948 and was supposed to be temporary. It grew to be by most accounts the largest garbage dump in the world.

I had the pleasure(?!) of growing up about two blocks away from one section of the dump. I can remember before it was there. It was a salt marsh