Brookfield Park

Brookfield Park is a large natural area of about 258 acres in the Mid-Island section of Staten Island, with its main entrance at Arthur Kill Road and Brookfield Avenue overlooking Richmond Creek. One of the newest major parks in the city, it was created by transforming a former municipal landfill into restored meadows, wetlands, and woodlands.

The site operated as a New York City municipal solid waste landfill from 1966 until 1980, and it also illegally received toxic waste, leaving a serious legacy of contamination. A 1982 investigation led to criminal convictions, and the cleanup that followed became one of the most expensive environmental remediation efforts in the borough's history.

The 256.4-million-dollar landfill-to-park transformation, funded by the city's Department of Environmental Protection and New York State, sealed the waste beneath an impermeable barrier covered by a four-foot layer of soil totaling some two million tons. More than 17,000 trees and 76,000 plants were installed to restore the land and help preserve 16 acres of tidal and freshwater wetlands.

Brookfield Park opened to the public on December 12, 2017, an occasion that pushed the city's total parkland past 30,000 acres in the largest single expansion of the park system in more than a century. Several miles of marked and unmarked trails wind through grasslands, woodlands, marshes, and ponds, with views across Richmond Creek to the uplands of neighboring LaTourette Park.

Brookfield Park stands alongside Freshkills Park as evidence of Staten Island's remarkable record of reclaiming damaged land, turning a former toxic dump into a serene natural landscape and showing that even the most degraded sites can be restored to ecological and recreational value.