A Landscaper’s Biggest Job Yet: Mowing the Lawn at Fresh Kills Landfill

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times The grass being mowed at the former Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, which is being transformed into a park.

Silvio Gallazzini recently hired a fellow landscaper to manicure his own backyard in New Jersey, which is understandable given the demands of his latest job. There was no way he could do it all himself.

“I was just running out of time,” Mr. Gallazzini explained the other day, pausing only briefly while mowing hundreds of mountainous acres on Staten Island that are barren, closed to the public, shrouded in grass as high as 10 feet and sit atop what was once the world’s largest landfill.

One day this sprawling swath of lawn will be transformed into the city’s second largest park (Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx is the biggest). The first small portion, Schmul Park, a renovated playground with basketball and handball courts, opened last October.

Freshkills Park will measure 2,200 acres when it is completed in several decades, an undulating preserve featuring wetlands, meadows and spectacular vistas that already mask its former incarnation. The Fresh Kills landfill closed in 2003 â€" it was officially shut in 2001 but had been reopened briefly to accommodate World Trade Center remains â€" after serving since the 1940s as the repository for much of the city’s garbage.

Why the city would have to mow a former landfill is a fair question, a question that evokes one of those “only in New York” answers.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation office that deals with natural resources would just as soon let the grass grow naturally, as a nature preserve. But the office in charge of solid waste wants the former landfill manicured periodically so it can be inspected for gas leaks and other malfunctions that could pose a hazard.

They, and city parks and environmental officials, finally compromised on one haircut a year, each fall. Mr. Gallazzini’s company, Trimalawn Equipment of Staten Island, won the three-year, $675,000 contract to mow Freshkills and another landfill in Edgemere in the Rockaways, beginning this fall.

Together, the area to be mowed comprises 850 acres, or more than all of Central Park. (The Fresh Kills portion accounts for about 600 of those acres.) Mr. Gallazzini’s company specializes in hillside mowing, and this is his biggest job yet. He said that it would take his crew about a month or so to mow the two sites and that the high grass and uneven surface posed special challenges on the roughly one-fourth of the total area of the former landfill that requires mowing and is composed of grassy mounds that are as tall as 200 feet.

“Mowing a landfill is not like mowing a park,” said Mr. Gallazzini, adding that this is the only work he’s doing at the moment. “There are a lot of unseen obstacles and ruts that you can’t see, besides the fact that it’s on a slope.”

Eloise Hirsh, the park administrator, said the first big section of the park is now projected to open in 2016. Meanwhile, though, she said, mowing produces cuttings that decompose and enrich the soil and also allow people to see the undulating terrain that will eventually comprise the park.

Last year, as an experiment, the park imported a herd of 20 goats from upstate as living lawn mowers.

“They were a sustainable way of getting rid of some invasive vegetation,” Ms. Hirsh said, without the use of heavy equipment or fossil fuels. She said she hoped to expand the pioneering project in the near future.

“I’d love to have my own herd, but we’d have to see,” she said. “The city does not currently have a ‘goatherd’ title” in its Civil Service job classifications.