One of New York City’s few recent architectural triumphs doesn’t have a star architect associated with it — or any architect for that matter. It’s located in a peripheral neighborhood whose existence is unknown to even the most adventurous tourist. It doesn’t have a food hall, an expensive art museum, or a cluster of offices or condos surrounding it. It is unheralded but not unvisited: On a recent plague-stricken Saturday, the parking lot at Shirley Chisholm State Park, sections of which began opening in mid-2019, was just about entirely full, which is only slightly fuller than it proved to be the following Thursday morning.
An instant icon of anti-starchitecture, Shirley Chisholm does much of what any worthwhile contribution to the built environment is supposed to do: It provides practical value to actual people while appealing to our cravings for beauty, harmony, and the experience of something greater than ourselves. New Yorkers have taken to griping about the icy monoliths of Hudson Yards, which opened last May. Yet few seem to realize that their exact opposite opened across the same city at nearly the same time.
Shirley Chisholm, named after the Brooklyn native who became the first African American woman elected to Congress, is built on two former landfills jutting into Jamaica Bay from Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. The garbage lots were covered with 100,000 dump trucks’ worth of clean soil over a decade ago, creating a four-foot layer of earth atop which a park would be built at some indeterminate later date. A senior New York Department of Environmental Protection official, John McLaughlin — who is not an architect but had worked with the landscape designer Leslie Sauer in turning Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill into a park — divided the future Shirley Chisholm “into a series of ‘islands,’ assigning a different mix of plants to reflect a different ecological niche in the region,” per a 2009 New York Times story.
The results are wondrous. The old refuse heaps are now ethereal waves of hills and valleys blanketed in tall prairie grasses and dotted with clusters of jagged trees, marsh bushes, and other characteristic flora of the Long Island shoreline. Between the south landfill, now entirely opened, and the north landfill, which is opening in phases until 2021, there are some 10 miles of trails where walkers might cross paths with snowy owls, peregrine falcons, rabbits, and butterflies. As in Central Park, a dozen miles to the northwest, only the wildlife is fully natural: Every cattail has been laid down deliberately. The result is an alluring middle ground between human design and natural evolution — appropriate for a place that offers stunning views of a National Wildlife Refuge on one side and the Manhattan skyline on the other.
At Shirley Chisholm, it takes just as much imagination to see a former landfill as it does to see a fully uncreated landscape. But the suspicion of artificiality ends up being crucial to the place’s charm: The hilly park towers over a wild-looking natural beach, and the earthworks ascend into miraculously open and empty skies, filling dazzling points in a space that nature itself would never have reached. The park is the tallest thing for miles around that isn’t a bridge or an apartment building. It’s as if the waste had been dumped there so that some ingenious future planner could remold it into its paradoxical mirror image: an island of nature created by human trash.
These natural-yet-unnatural green and amber hills are an arresting enough sight on their own, especially since they’re flush against the Belt Parkway. It’s mind-boggling to think of what the location used to be. For over 50 years, the residents of the nearby Starrett City projects lived next to a putrid dump, a constant reminder of how little the city and society in general seemed to value them. Yet in that 2009 New York Times story, a Starrett City resident who gave tours in the newly green-capped landfill compared walking through it to “a day in the Alps” and hailed the new wilderness as “better than a park.” It is rare for design to rectify so grave a social error. Too often, 21st-century New York architecture is itself the error, as with the Museum of Modern Art’s unconscionable destruction of the American Folk Art Museum to make way for its recent expansion — or those new subway stations on the Upper East Side, whose expense and extravagance might have killed off any meaningful public transit expansion for a decade. For those who want proof that a better way is possible here, look to Shirley Chisholm.
Standing on the park’s ridgeline, you can see decades’ worth of New York’s embraced and abandoned urban destinies. It’s said that one can behold “the whole city” from the top of the Empire State Building or the back deck of the Staten Island Ferry, but the high point at Shirley Chisholm is that rare vantage point from which nothing is hidden and nothing feels far away. From 150 feet off the ground, you can see the awesome towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the grove of skyscrapers cluttering Manhattan’s financial district. You can see an arc of unharassed marshland bracketed by Kennedy International Airport and a ziggurat-like World War II-era hanger sitting at the end of a decommissioned runway at Floyd Bennett Field (a disused naval air station that is another one of the city’s great unlikely oases). Looming far behind the creeks, marinas, and public housing of Brooklyn’s southern edge, you can see the faraway church spires and crops of green marking the borough’s opulent brownstone belt. Face a little to the east, and you’ll glimpse a strip mall just across the highway, which has a nice-looking Target. This is New York in its entirety, top to bottom, nothing withheld.
Shirley Chisholm could not have started its phased opening at a better time. The dirt paths, high grass, and even the handsome wood-cut park benches feel like they’re somewhere far outside the city. In the coronavirus era, the park’s spell is especially complete. On recent visits, young children darted up the hilltops, mountain bikers huffed to the top of the old trash mounds, and older men cast their fishing rods into Jamaica Bay. Against all logic, seemingly against reality itself, everyone looked happy.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
