out on the edge of town

Category: Stories

Dreier Offerman/Calvert Vaux park is, like many NYC parks, essentially landfill that has been grassed over and turned into recreation space. I first visited the location in the company of Larry Major, the regional Park & Recreation Manager who oversees not only this park, but the entire Coney Island Beach property as well. Larry and I walked out to the edge of the park so that I could show him where I was proposing to place the beacons. Along the way we passed well used baseball and soccer fields and a piece of pavement well used by model helicopter fans. Through the grassy area we passed some pretty big sink holes, in which you could see the strata of layers of waste. A lot of the South Brooklyn shorefront is made up of the construction waste from the building of the Belt Parkway (which so effectively cuts off area residents from the recreation space), but there is plenty of other trash in there as well. There was clearly visible piping and other metal objects as well as what looked like home construction waste - bricks and concrete. (Building construction waste is the largest waste producer in NYC).