We never thought it would happen, but shows what we know. The 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island really is going to be turned into New York City's largest park. The Parks Department has already put 14 feet of soil over the dump since 2001 and is now ready to start giving tours!

Fresh Kills Park will be nearly triple the size of Central Park and is expected to take more than 30 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete, though the city intends to open parts of it to the public starting next year. The plan for the park includes cycling trails, tennis courts, greenhouses, stables, birding platforms, a sports stadium and a 9/11 memorial — an earthen sculpture as long as the twin towers were tall, to be built on the mound where rescuers sifted through the World Trade Center wreckage.

- Check out the sponsored link beneath our Braunstein coverage from yesterday... indeed (thanks Joe!). Did we mention that Peter Braunstein got busted? more ›

Back in September Robert Smithson's Floating Island was followed by a replica of the Gates gates (attached to an outboard motor.) Shoving off from DUMBO, with it's saffron flag waving in the wind, it sailed free on the water chasing the island. From November 18 through December 22, the boat with its makeshift saffron sail will be on display along with a film that documents the adventure. As the press release states, "It's about artists on the fringe, overly regulated public space, and firm opinions on a lot of bad public art." more ›

It hardly feels like The Gates happened six months ago, but they did and the Post has an update of where they are now. Most likely, The Gates are headed to a home improvement store not in this NYC-area, as the materials have been recycled as promised. The billowing curtains were stripped and respun into "new" nylon thread, while the metal parts were melted down and the saffron metal parts were ground into 500,000 pounds of chips. Then Plastival, a Chicago company, turned the chips into fencing that is white vinyl on the outside but saffron on the inside. So, a little bit of our shared Central Park experience may be on the lawns of Middle America, where they won't have to deal with a Gates hangover. Now, for the Floating Island's dirt to be spread across the the country as well. more ›

"Floating Island," Robert Smithson's Central Park on the water, had a special visitor on Thursday when a would-be Christo pursued the moving art installation on a motorboat topped with a saffron gate. Don't worry though, the apparently very serious motor-boaters never made it on to the island. more ›

There is so much going on in the five boroughs of New York, so many people, so many buildings, that it can be easy to forget that, unless you are in the Bronx, you are living on an island. It's just that memory lapse that a new exhibit from the late Robert Smithson and the Whitney tries to counteract. more ›