LILA 2024 Jury Award

Shirley Chisholm State Park by


2024 Public Projects / New York / Built in 2021 /
mvvainc.com

This landfill transformation is a low-budget effort to establish a welcoming landscape for Brooklynites. The MVVA team, limited by a small budget, excels in precision, focusing only on what truly matters in designing an escape from the dense city, a space that is more open to the sky and sea and not burdened by many programs, shapes and features. In Shirley Chisholm State Park, MVVA exposes the very core of landscape architecture as a discipline that is able to transform tight budgets into flourishing and kind landscape gestures, improving human and non-human lives. It shows how important it is to have a truly open space that is undetermined, less specified, a space that breaths and leaves one to simply be in the landscape.

- from the award statements

Set along Jamaica Bay in southern Brooklyn, Shirley Chisholm State Park transforms a pair of closed-and-capped landfills into a vibrant community hub. When the landfills stopped operating in the 1980s, the city, building on research that had been conducted at a larger site on Staten Island, covered them with three feet of soil, making it possible to plant not just grass, which could hardly disguise the origins of the two hills, but thousands of native trees and shrubs. As the meadows began to flourish, community advocates were determined to see the fenced-off wonderland become a badly needed park. But how? On a tight budget and compressed schedule, the MVVA created new entrances to set a welcoming tone for the entire 407-acre parcel, and then devised nodes both for active recreation and for quiet contemplation. Those cover a small fraction of the park’s land area but draw people onto its 10 miles of trails. The park was immediately embraced by the community, making it a fitting tribute to Brooklyn’s pioneering public servant Shirley Chisholm.

For New Yorkers driving to Kennedy Airport or the south shore of Long Island, the trash mountains were unpleasant; for residents of the adjoining neighborhoods they were a noxious fact of daily life. These were the Penn and Fountain landfills, owned and operated by the City of New York from the 1950s through the 1980s. In its last year of operation, 1985, the Fountain landfill sucked up an incredible 8,200 tons of trash each day. Although the Federal government intended to include part of the property in its new Gateway National Park, the city was responsible for continuing remediation of the landfills. As part of that process, it had the foresight to cover the hills’ plastic caps with 1.2 million cubic yards of soil (enough to fill nearly 100,000 dump trucks), eventually allowing a wide variety of plants to grow. That included trees, which were normally discouraged on landfills because their roots can pierce the plastic caps, but which, if chosen carefully, develop shallow root systems that help keep topsoil in place. Between 2004 and 2008 the site was planted with more than 33,000 trees and shrubs (most grown from seed, to allow them to adapt to the environment), along with native grasses and wildflowers. The result was a diverse ecosystem of coastal meadows, wetlands, and woodlands that has attracted a variety of local wildlife. But it wasn’t a park, because there was no way for people to get in, and nothing waiting for them if they did. Residents of the East New York neighborhood were ready for the fences to come down.

Then, in 2017, the MVVA was invited to a meeting with the state parks commissioner. A handful of public officials had worked tirelessly to fashion a cooperation agreement among the state, which would run the park; the federal government, which agreed to lease the land to the state for 60 years; and the city, which remains responsible for safely decommissioning the landfills. With the agreement in hand, the state was ready to create a park. But it had just $35 million to spend.

Tackling the entire 407 acres was out of the question. Luckily, with 3.5 miles of Jamaica Bay shoreline, the marshy riverine ecology of Hendrix Creek, and the slopes of waving grasses and wildflowers, the site was already appealing. But there was not a single source of shade and nothing of human scale to make people feel welcome. So the firm proposed targeted interventions that would seem small relative to the overall site—covering about 15 acres—but would serve as portals, connectors, focal points and destinations. The state insisted that the two landfill sites be connected across Hendrix Creek; the MVVA team realized that with the addition of several sinuous paths, an existing bridge would not only serve as that connector but would make the park part of a citywide bike trail system, and a stopping point for hundreds of riders each day.    

Inside the Pennsylvania Avenue Entrance, MVVA designed a parking lot replete with hardy coastal plants. An artist born and based in Brooklyn transformed all four walls of an operations building into a richly colored mural, with a portrait of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress and the first woman and African American to run for president, as its focal point.

From the two entrances, miles of paths lead to “points of interest” like the Hendrix Patio, a relaxing space on the banks of Hendrix Creek. MVVA rebuilt the water’s edge, with planted mounds raised above flood levels and held in place by granite seating. A pair of “bicycle libraries” allow visitors to borrow a variety of two-wheeled vehicles. Now the park is the go-to spot for East New York parents teaching their kids to ride.

The Sky Bowl is a new, raised landform atop the former Fountain Avenue landfill, at an elevation of 130 feet. Carefully engineered with the addition of new, lightweight fill over the cap, the bowl is a lush, sodded mound surrounded by log benches (designed for the site) and a ring of trees. “It takes work to get up there, but it’s worth every step,” said one local official. “You’re in a halo of river birch trees, and you feel like you’re suspended out over the water.” Views include the Manhattan skyline, Coney Island, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Jamaica Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Location: 1750 Granville Payne Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11239

Design year: 2017

Year Completed: 2021

logo-landscape-forms

LILA 2025 Sponsor

Info