LOCAL CRITTERS DUMPSTRUCK

One humid afternoon in July, José Ramírez-Garofalo drove his large Toyota truck through the lush new hills, valleys, and meadows of Freshkills Park, a twenty-two-hundred-acre green space that the city is constructing on Staten Island.

- —Eric Lach

José Ramírez-Garofalo

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

Ramírez-Garofalo, a young man with dark hair, large forearms, and the beginnings of a goatee, drove and talked fast. “It’s an impermeable geotextile membrane,” he said, referring to the thick plastic that was used, starting in the mid-nineties, to cap the four giant trash mounds of the old Fresh Kills landfill. “On top there is playground soil.”