Virginia Beach had a problem that most cities solve with geography: nowhere to put its garbage. The city sits on the flat coastal plain of the Chesapeake, with the water table lurking six to eight feet below the surface, which rules out the traditional American method of finding a gulley and filling it. As the city’s sanitation engineer Charles Kiley put it in 1971, they had completely filled their last dump, and there wasn’t a valley in that flat country to fill next.
A state health official named Roland E. Dorer looked at the problem and proposed the inversion that made the place famous. If you cannot dig down, build up. Take the garbage that has nowhere to go and make it into the thing coastal Virginia conspicuously lacks: a hill.
Garbage lasagna, engineered
What went up between 1967 and the early 1970s was not a dump with grass on it but a deliberately engineered structure, assembled to a recipe. Refuse was spread and compacted under tremendous pressure into layers 18 inches deep, and each layer was sealed under six inches of clean soil before the next began, so that the mound rose as hundreds of discrete, entombed cells of trash, each wrapped in its own earthen envelope. The compaction was the insurance policy: crush the layers hard enough and the mountain would not slump, shift or collapse as the garbage inside it slowly decomposed and settled.
The soil for all those caps had to come from somewhere, and the somewhere is the detail that completes the design. Crews dredged the fill from the swampy ground beside the dump site, and the borrow pit their dredges left behind filled with water and became the lake that now sits at the mountain’s foot, 52-acre Lake Trashmore, stocked with fish and ringed by a fitness trail. The park’s two signature landforms are the same earthmoving operation seen from opposite ends: the hill is the hole, inverted.
By the time dumping stopped in 1971, the mound held more than 640,000 tons of municipal garbage, compacted and layered into a grass-ready landform 60 feet high and over 800 feet long, the highest point in Virginia Beach. The park built on top opened to the public in the early 1970s, with the city claiming, accurately, the nation’s first landfill park, 165 acres of picnic shelters, playgrounds and kite-flying slopes on the roof of the city’s own refuse.
The name the city couldn’t kill
Officialdom did not choose the name. During construction, residents watching the trash mound rise started calling it Mount Trashmore, a joke on Mount Rushmore, and by 1969 the nickname had stuck so thoroughly that the parks commission staged a rearguard action for something dignified, proposing to name the park after Dorer himself. Dorer declined the honor but agreed the trash name had to go, arguing it had described the construction, not the finished park. The public disagreed, in the timeless manner later perfected by Boaty McBoatface, and the city surrendered. The name went official, and Virginia Beach has spent fifty years discovering that self-deprecating honesty is better marketing than dignity: Mount Trashmore is now the city’s most popular park, a sister park to Haginodai Park in Japan, and a minor pilgrimage site in the history of waste management, imitated by landfill conversions across the country up to New York’s vastly larger Freshkills.
The buried city occasionally reminds everyone it is there. Decomposing garbage produces methane, and the mountain is vented to release it, a fact that became civic legend in 1992 when a local radio DJ’s April Fool’s broadcast warned that Mount Trashmore was about to explode; 911 lines lit up, families fled the area, and the city, once the panic subsided, installed additional venting flagpoles, partly as engineering and partly, one suspects, as reassurance you can see from the parking lot.
The point of the mountain
It is worth placing Mount Trashmore in its decade to feel its originality. In the late 1960s, the standard fate of a full dump was abandonment behind a fence, and the standard fate of household garbage was an open, burning, rat-run tip. Virginia Beach, forced by its water table to break with both, accidentally invented the template modern closed landfills follow, cap, contour, vent, monitor, reuse, and proved the public would not merely tolerate but embrace recreation on top of refuse, provided the engineering was honest and the grass was mowed.
The park’s designers left the lesson sitting in plain sight, in the landscape itself. Families picnic on the mountain and fish in the lake, and the two are a single transaction: every foot of the hill’s height was paid for with a foot of the lake’s depth, soil moved from the wet hole to the dry pile until the city’s garbage wore the swamp as a coat. Virginia Beach needed to hide 640,000 tons of trash and had nowhere to hide it, so it hid it in the open, sixty feet up, under a name that admits everything. The disguise has held for half a century, mostly because it never pretended to be one.
