After biking for miles, zig-zagging around double-parked cars and crossing six-lane roads, being greeted by the 15-foot-tall face of a Black woman feels like a warm welcome. She has a serene, slightly mischievous smile on her face, surrounded by butterflies and flowers, her gaze pointed toward Manhattan. At this point, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve visited Shirley Chisholm State Park, a sprawling 407-acre park along the Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn. I found a photo from my first visit in May 2020 with my friend G. They’re in the foreground, wearing a helmet and a red bandana covering their nose and mouth, while I’m in the background, six-ish feet away, my bandana pulled down, smiling in front of the Shirley Chisholm mural at the park’s entrance. The park officially opened in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t until 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, that I began viewing the park as a critical piece of infrastructure.

It’s understood that parks and open spaces are vital to our well-being. They are the places we go to connect to nature, center our thoughts, and move our bodies. They can also be physical forms of restorative justice, redressing histories of disinvestment and serving as critical pieces of climate infrastructure. Under the current Trump administration, the resounding message is that spending money on parks, investing in climate strategies, and upholding environmental regulations is wasteful. A prime example of government inefficiency. The subtext is that we somehow won’t feel the vacuum created when an administration cuts tens of thousands of jobs that touch everything from housing vouchers, to weather forecasting, to student financial aid, to vaccine research, to energy and cooling assistance. In this vision of government, public servants are merely paper-pushers who create unnecessary red tape.

When I think back to my time as a public servant, working on climate policy for New York City, a word that comes to mind is care, a collective of people working with imperfect tools to protect New Yorkers against the impacts of climate change out of a sense of duty and care. When I’m in Shirley Chisholm State Park, I think of the care that went into creating it, a 30-year transformation process. The process involved closing two massive landfills, forging agreements between city, state, and federal agencies, and establishing new standards for how parks can be safely built on reclaimed land. I’m also reminded of the sense of care that guided the park’s namesake.

Shirley Chisholm would launch her campaign for president in 1972, six miles away from her future park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. As a congresswoman, she advanced a slew of care-centred policies. For example, by creating the WIC program and expanding the reach of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, she combated food insecurity in low-income families. She also fought for the expansion of social infrastructure, using her pre-elected official experience as an early education and child-welfare expert to advocate for a network of free and low-cost childcare centers, a policy idea that is still being championed today. In her presidential campaign speech, she was critical of a war abroad costing the U.S. billions of dollars while schools were underfunded, at a time when inflation made basic essentials exorbitantly expensive, healthcare costs soared, affordable housing programs were being dismantled, and environmental degradation worsened.

Her run coincided with the beginnings of the environmental justice movement, including mounting examples of environmental racism showing that Black and brown Americans were more likely to live near contaminated waste sites (a pattern that continues today). Shirley Chisholm Park started as a pair of landfills. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Fountain and Pennsylvania Avenue landfills were the legal and illegal dumping grounds of New York City, the final destination for 40% of the city’s commercial and residential waste. The combination of oil spills, trash fires, putrid smells, and coastal breezes from Jamaica Bay meant that residents of Starrett City, Canarsie, and East New York were inhaling the city’s discards. All the while, as white flight changed the demographics of the city, these communities would become predominantly Black and Brown, and Canarsie in particular would be a bastion of AfroCaribbean homeownership.

With the mounting evidence of illegal dumping and through local environmental justice advocacy, the landfills were eventually decommissioned and the sites were covered with 1.2 million cubic yards of soil. The remediation and creation of the park involved an alphabet soup of federal, state, and city agencies. The New York City Department of Sanitation, which owned and operated the site, deeded the land to the National Park Service in the 1970s. The Department of Environmental Protection led the remediation and capping of the landfill in the early 2000s, and the state parks department entered into a legal agreement between the city and the federal government to lease the land and create a new state park in 2017. I wish a park like this existed sooner, but I’m not surprised it took 30 years. Trash alchemy takes time.

Local environmental protection officials advocated for construction and design standards that made it feasible to plant shrubs and trees on top of the landfill without compromising the protective barrier that capped the waste. Historically, capped landfills had been transformed into manicured lawns and were not designed as accessible open spaces. The process also typically involves elaborate and visible pipe systems to allow for the off-gassing of methane produced by the decomposition of organic waste. Because of bureaucratic foresight, much of that infrastructure is hidden — thousands of meters of piping lie underground, carrying gas to two flares at either end of the park.

The 10 miles of gravel hiking and biking trails running throughout the park function as environmental testing paths, allowing workers to monitor gas emissions and take samples. Wayfinding structures throughout the park, designed by MVVA, are mini obelisks mounted on heavy concrete plinths to avoid the need for footings in the topsoil. Old “coming soon” signs that had lined the Belt Parkway for years were repurposed as welcome signage. The park’s extensive fencing network, which demarcates park space from environmental monitoring space, became a stage to showcase the park’s wildlife through jewel-toned fence screening featuring black stencil prints of butterflies, turtles, and fish species native to the area. The building with Shirley Chisholm’s mural is strategically located in a transitional zone at grade, just off the capped landfill. The elevation created by capping the landfills offers panoramic views of Lower Manhattan and flood protection; during Superstorm Sandy, the site was largely unscathed and served as a buffer, protecting Starrett City from coastal flooding.

Over 200 bird species have been recorded in the park. Last December, a snowy owl was spotted, the first time the bird had been seen in Brooklyn in years. Whenever I’m biking through the park, I ride past countless children learning how to ride a bike, a safe, car-free oasis along the Belt Parkway where New Yorkers can fall in love with cycling. This kind of multi-layered infrastructure (environmental remediation, community space, habitat restoration, and flood protection) would not be possible without rigorous environmental regulations, environmental justice advocates, designers and policy experts, and governments investing in projects that center the care and well-being of the people they serve.

The backside of the building with the Shirley Chisholm mural features one of her most timeless quotes: “Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.” It’s a fitting quote for a park that provides a lot of lessons in what service can look like. This park was not a given. At any point, negotiations could have fallen apart, a change in administration could have meant going back to the drawing board, and communities that waited 30 years for safe access to the waterfront could have waited another 30 years. But it happened through persistence, creative design and policy solutions, and vision. It makes me think about what’s still possible when care, not contempt, is the foundation of governance.

This post was originally published on Next City.