Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires: How The Great Gatsby Changed the Landscape of New York City

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But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.
–Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
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Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby. And if The Great Gatsby did, it did so thanks to one of its first and most ambitious readers, the urban planner Robert Moses.

Next year marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Great Gatsby. The novel survives in cultural memory as a narrative of star-crossed lovers (Gatsby and Daisy); as a reckoning with the elusive quality of the American dream (Gatsby and the green light); or, most commonly—witness its latest revival on Broadway—as a celebration of the excitement and excess of Jazz Age America. Few remember it for what it is: an indictment of, if not the wealthy per se, than of how wealth can deform basic human decency.

The climax of the novel makes the point. In a Manhattan hotel room, Daisy informs her husband, Tom Buchanan, that she intends to leave him and marry Gatsby. After revealing the sordid ways Gatsby has made his money—bootlegging whiskey and passing fraudulent bonds—Tom bullies Daisy into staying with him. On the drive back to Long Island, Daisy accidentally runs over and kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle. Rather than owning up to what she has done, Daisy agrees to let Gatsby say that he was driving the car. At home, she reunites with Tom, who can protect her from the consequences of what in the eyes of the law—or in the billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg anyway—is at least accidental death and at worst involuntary manslaughter. And protect her Tom does. When Myrtle’s deranged husband, George Wilson, shows up at the house looking for the person who killed his wife, Tom points him toward Gatsby. George kills Gatsby, then himself, and all the Buchanan problems are solved. The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, is so sickened by what has happened that he leaves New York. Readers are—or should be—equally sickened.

The book is no museum piece, however. Fitzgerald wrote the novel during a period when every year the rich grew richer still. We live in a similar period, and the novel speaks to our age of runaway wealth as much as it did to its original. A culture of wealth, the novel implies, is also a culture of waste, including environmental waste. Although no one is innocent, including us for mimicking them, the wealthy bear more responsibility for this waste than do others.

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In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Long Island and commuted to Manhattan by car and train. His path skirted Flushing Meadows and the Corona Dump, where from 1910 to 1934 the borough of Brooklyn had deposited an estimated fifty million cubic yards of garbage and ash. At the time, most stoves and furnaces consumed coal, and the waste product, ash, had to go somewhere. For decades, it went to the Corona Dump. Mounds rose as high as thirty and forty feet and one, dubbed Mount Corona, rose ninety feet.

The dump would play a crucial role in the novel Fitzgerald was writing at the time. In the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, famously describes what he calls “a valley of ashes”:

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About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

The beauty of this passage, if you can speak of beauty in it, is how the ashes in the valley of ashes come alive. A “certain desolate area of land” turns into “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat.” The ashes turn into a landscape—ridges, hills, and gardens—that encompass the farm. Finally, the landscape gives birth to humans, first their houses and chimneys but then the “ash-grey men” who appear dimly and, like the geographical formations the ash creates, already crumbling. The final sentence is the most disturbing. It could easily belong in one of the circles of hell Dante describes in The Inferno. Its verbs invoke disquieting creatures: the grey cars “crawl” like a snake; they give out a “ghastly creak” like a ghost; and the men “swarm” the cars like flies to a carcass. Eventually, all disappears behind a veil of ashes.

Like the nauseating smell of the Corona Dump, which wafted to adjacent neighborhoods and forced residents to keep their windows closed, especially in the summer, the dust in the “valley of ashes” does not stay put. In the novel, it goes where death goes.

Here and elsewhere in the novel, Fitzgerald has arranged his ashes and dust just so. The motif appears over and over again. In the second chapter, when Myrtle is at her liveliest, she is described as “smouldering.” Later in the chapter, she includes “one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring” on the “list of all things [she’s] got to get.” After Daisy runs her over, Nick observes that Myrtle “knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust.”

Or when Gatsby returns to his mansion after Daisy has forsaken him, he and Nick search for a cigarette—more ashes—and Nick observes “an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere.” Soon, the ashen figure of George Wilson will appear to spread the dust from mansion to owner. Indeed, Wilson is dust personified. Floating in his swimming pool, Gatsby sees the “ashen, fantastic figure” of George Wilson “gliding toward him.” Earlier in the novel, Nick has observed of Wilson that “a white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity.”

Then there is this: As Nick and the gardener carry Gatsby’s body to the mansion, the gardener spots Wilson’s body “a little way off in the grass.” “The holocaust,” Nick observes, “was complete.” Prior to the Second World War, holocaust did not refer to the mass murder of Jews and other outsiders. It referred to wholesale destruction, usually by fire. Its etymology makes that clear. The word comes from the Greek holos, meaning “whole,” and kaustos, meaning “burnt.” The whole of it is burnt.

Seen through the dust, darkly, The Great Gatsby reads like an exercise in the waste of energy (coal), land (Flushing Meadows), and life (Myrtle, Gatsby, and George). You can read its famous ending many ways, but one of the most disturbing is that there will be no returning to the “fresh, green breast of the new world” that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” Like Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, whom Nick will call “a rotten crowd,” the continent, like milk, has soured. Starting with the Dutch sailors, as the land is developed, it is simultaneously despoiled. Ashes cannot turn back into coal. Nor can the dump turn back into the ecologically vital wetlands it used to be.

One of the titles Fitzgerald gave to his novel—he was never satisfied with any of them—was Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires. The title juxtaposes landscape (ash heaps) and humans (millionaires), and its preposition, Among, implies a shared world, one that includes both setting and character. And so it is. Or was. Until the city turned to its master builder to clean up the mess—a master builder whose reading of The Great Gatsby would inspire him to redeem the wasteland.

If you go looking for the valley of ashes today, you will find not ashes but a baseball stadium (Citi Field), a tennis center (home to the U.S. Open), two man-made lakes, an amusement park, and most disconcerting of all, a stainless-steel sculpture of the globe measuring 115 feet in diameter. There is also a zoo. In less than a decade, the Corona Dump went from blight to blessing. In doing so, it embodied the decisions that would lead, step by step, to our own experiment in creating waste, and to the potentially catastrophic climate change we face as a result.

One can imagine a world in which, absent The Great Gatsby, there would be no Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. At the least, the park would have dropped down the list of urban planning priorities Moses kept.

In 1934, New York City closed the Corona Dump. But now it had a valley of ashes on its hands. Where others saw ashes, Robert Moses, the infamous urban planner, saw an opportunity. In 1932, Moses was appointed Commissioner of the New York City Parks Department, the perch from which he would oversee the remaking of the city for the next twenty-five years. In 1934, Moses added to his resumé when he was appointed chair of the Triborough Bridge Authority and salvaged that project from runaway costs and runaway incompetence. Unsatisfied by his bridges, Moses sought to build a parkway—what eventually became Grand Central Parkway—connecting the Queens–Wards Island span of the Triborough Bridge to the existing parkway of Eastern Long Island. The route, Moses wrote a few years later, “led inevitably along the Flushing Bay through the Flushing Meadow and the middle of the Corona Dump.” “This was the logical place for it,” he added, “but only on the assumption that there was to be a general reclamation of the surrounding area.” In the midst of the Great Depression, however, “there was no sign of money in the offing.”

Until, that is, what Moses called “a group of prominent citizens” wanted to hold a World’s Fair in the city in 1939. Moses told the planners that “the Flushing Meadow was the only place in New York where they could get any cooperation from the Parks Department.” Of course, Moses was the Parks Department, so Flushing Meadow it would be. Moses could not have cared less about a fair, which he dismissed as an exercise in “amusements and ballyhoo.” For him, as he wrote in 1938, the “fair was the obvious bait for the reclamation of the meadow.” It would fund his ambitious plan to turn the Corona Dump into a park even larger than Central Park.

Strangely, and a little surprisingly, Moses often credited The Great Gatsby as part of his inspiration for remaking Flushing Meadows. In his 1938 article for The Saturday Evening Post, Moses immodestly described his heroic efforts to turn the landscape, as his title put it, “From Dump to Glory.” In the same article, he quotes the “valley of ashes” paragraphs from Fitzgerald and says of The Great Gatsby that it “remained a good yarn even after the Depression had leveled off the moraine of gold deposited on the North Shore in the delirious Twenties.” By 1938, the novel—and its author—had been all but forgotten, so much so that Moses had to summarize the plot for his readers: “It was a gaudy tale about a racketeer who tried to break into North Shore Long Island to be near a woman with whom he had enjoyed a fleeting romance.”

In 1966, after scholars and readers had rediscovered Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, Moses published a pamphlet, The Saga of Flushing Meadow, that described how “two World’s Fairs had ushered in, at the very geographical and population center of New York, on the scene of a notorious ash dump, one of the very great municipal parks of our country.” The cover of the pamphlet depicts the aerial photograph of the area that Moses commissioned in 1934 before work began on the Corona Dump. Moses has labeled the photograph “The Valley of Ashes.” And in 1974, Moses wrote a 3,500-word letter to The New Yorker after it published excerpts of the unflattering biography of him written by Robert Caro. In it, Moses bragged “of the huge task of reclaiming this fetid meadow blocked by the biggest ash dump in municipal history, so well described in ‘The Great Gatsby.’”

In the 1974 letter, Moses defended himself from critics “who shout for rails and inveigh against rubber but admit that they live in the suburbs and that their wives are absolutely dependent on motor cars.” Like it or not, he asserted, “We live in a motorized city.” (Alas, he was right.) If so, the 1939 World’s Fair prepared the way for that motorized city. As part of the planning for the fair, Moses got his roads. Flushing Meadow was now bounded on three sides by highways: Whitestone Parkway (later the Van Wyck Expressway) to the east; an expanded Union Turnpike to the south; and Grand Central Parkway to the west. Today, Flushing Meadow looks like a park circled and intersected by highways. (The Long Island Expressway bisects it like a crease in a sheet of paper.) Throughout, the park contains some of the most dizzying cloverleaf interchanges in the city, perhaps in the country.

In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the official name of the park, one can witness the layers of waste that would eventually threaten a motorized city and a motorized country alike—indeed, a motorized civilization. Coal mined in Pennsylvania made its way to Brooklyn and other cities, where it heated houses and buildings and left behind millions of tons of ashes, which would lay waste to Flushing Meadows. Yet the burning of coal would generate another form of waste, carbon dioxide, which did not leave behind a material residue like ashes but would cumulatively cause as much or more environmental damage as ashes. And those cars zipping up Grand Central Parkway past the reclaimed Flushing Meadows burned through gasoline that would generate still more carbon. The coal came from Pennsylvania, the gasoline from Texas, and the carbon from the consumption of each. Unsurprisingly, global carbon dioxide levels began to increase around the turn of the twentieth century and, except for a few years during the Great Depression, steadily swoop upward. To this day, the sector that contributes the most to greenhouse gases is transportation.

No small part of the environmental damage visited upon the earth in the century since The Great Gatsby was published traces back to the wealthy. Follow the money, and there you find the waste.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy would reveal everything that went wrong with the human engineering of Flushing Meadows. Since the glaciers retreated roughly 10,000 years ago, the acreage the Corona Dumps sat on had been marshland, a low-lying sponge that soaked up tidal waters from Flushing Bay and overflow rain from the surrounding areas. No more. The burning of coal added carbon to the atmosphere. The burning of gasoline added still more. Both raised sea levels and warmed the ocean, making hurricanes stronger and more likely. And by turning Flushing Meadows into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Moses and the city replaced a sponge that would soak up seawater into, effectively, a concrete slab, which, like a shallow tub, would fill up and overflow into the basements and first floors of houses and businesses in surrounding neighborhoods. As happened during Hurricane Sandy—and as will almost certainly happen in future storms.

On the surface, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park looks more bucolic than when it was a valley of ashes. From a longer perspective, it looks like just another icon of waste.

Not everyone shares equally in the environmental mess we have made of this world. In 2019, the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States generated a little less than 10 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. That same year, the top 10 percent produced 75 tons of carbon per person. Globally, the top 10 percent was responsible for nearly half of all carbon emissions. And the top one percent created 17 percent of all emissions. In short, the wealthier the filthier, which makes sense. It is the wealthy that fly and buy the most.

If you believe, as I do, that the wealthy set the standard for consumption, which those below them aspire to and, as much as possible, adopt; and if you believe, as ecologically inclined economists do, that more and more consumption generates more and more waste; then it would seem that no small part of the environmental damage visited upon the earth in the century since The Great Gatsby was published traces back to the wealthy. Follow the money, and there you find the waste.

The relationship between waste and wealth can change how we read the last comments Nick offers about Tom and Daisy: “They were careless people,” he writes. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” We are still cleaning up that mess. In many ways, we have not even begun.

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