Rubble From 9/11 Was Sent to Just One Landfill. This Photographer Has Spent 9 Years Documenting It

After the 9/11 attacks in New York City, nearly 1.5 million tons of rubble were removed from the site and sent to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. Once the largest dump in the world, the 2,200-acre site had already been decommissioned, and a competition for park designers launched, when it was selected as the place where Ground Zero materials would be redirected. Finally, in 2003, the decades-long revitalization project that would turn the stinking landfill into a massive wildlife park—subtly renamed "Freshkills"—officially began. Led by landscape architect firm Field Operations, the project has been partially open to the public since 2021 and will be completed by 2037.

But photographer Jade Doskow has been well-acquainted with the goings-on in Staten Island. For the past nine years she has been photographing the park, now as the Photographer in Residence, documenting the curious landscape forms—four mounds: north, south, east, and west—with images that speak to a toxic archaeology-turned-rewilded paradise. The West Mound, where the waste from Ground Zero was sent, holds special significance for New Yorkers as it has become what she calls a "humble memorial" to that day. Doskow’s photographs are being exhibited at All Street Gallery this month as one of the many tributes to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. She spoke with Dwell about her work, and how her documentation speaks to the complexities of creating a natural parkland out of the past’s discards, and the ruins of tragedy.

Tell me about yourself and your photography practice—what informs your work?

Jade Doskow: The core of my inspiration, I would say, is the transformations within the urban built environment, and also the unexpected relationships and juxtapositions within that environment. In my previous project, Lost Utopias, I was looking at outdated World’s Fair architecture and landscaping globally, and now I’ve been working for eight years at Freshkills, which was New York City’s largest garbage dump, but is now being rewilded into this really amazing, fairly indescribable engineered wilderness.

What draws you to these subjects?

I grew up in a 1700s farmhouse in Pennsylvania, but I would often visit my grandmother in the Bronx, and she lived at the end of the train line overlooking these graffiti-covered subways, which was so fantastic. Part of living in this old house was that often these elements from the past would come up in the dirt, literally; pieces of ceramic or old tools would become unearthed. So I’ve always had this awareness that the past is always present, and certainly photography is the medium for that. It’s the one medium where we can really explore the past, present, and future almost as a time machine.

How did your residency come about?

I was winding down the Lost Utopias work after 12 years, and I suppose I was open to something new coming my way. I was teaching a School of Visual Arts class on liminal green spaces in the cities; we were going to community gardens and rooftop farms, and the typical parklands. Through my research, I came across Freshkills, and I arranged a visit. As soon as me and my students set foot onto the Freshkills hilltop, I was just blown away. I’ve just never experienced anything like it. It’s these kind of infinite meadowlands punctuated by methane pipes, and then surrounded by the New York City skyline to the north and to the west, the New Jersey industrial cityscape. I was immediately drawn in and asked how I could become the main photographer here. I ended up submitting a multipage proposal to Sanitation and Parks, and a few months later they approved my initial proposal, which was to photograph for 10 years all around the site. It’s such a complex place. I just keep learning more and more, and being more and more inspired.

Walk us through the landscape—what are some of the natural and unnatural layers that you were uncovering?

Fresh Kills stopped taking materials in 1996, and the only time the site was reopened was in 2001, following the Twin Towers tragedy. Because of that, the West Mound, which is where those materials were brought, has taken the longest time to rewild, engineer, and transform into its future self as a park or wilderness. Each of the mounds is a pyramid: Underneath are household waste and trash from the last 53 years, and then there’s multiple layers of engineering and barriers to essentially separate the new meadows and trees and so on from what’s beneath. It’s kind of like a mummification process. There’s leachate, which is what we would commonly call garbage juice—the liquid that you might find at the bottom of your compost or something like that. That has to be treated; there’s several laboratories on site at the leachate treatment plant that use a lengthy process of organic and inorganic steps to clean that water and return it safely to the waterways. Methane is also produced by garbage and Fresh Kills was actually one of the first sustainable sites in this country in that, starting in the 1980s, they were piping that methane into the usable gas grid of Staten Island. So within these pyramids, there’s methane wells and flare stations to burn the gas off. But above all that is the thick, impermeable plastic layer, on top of which soil is brought in from around the country. Then finally, that’s where the plantings happen, where they plant native plant grassland species to create the park of the future.