The Mountain That Garbage Built: Mount Trashmore's Second Act as a Park
It is 60 feet tall, capped, grassed, and beloved — a former landfill turned into the city's most democratic park, and a standing lesson in what a city can do with its worst idea.
Every Virginia Beach childhood includes the hill. Mount Trashmore — 165 acres, a main mound rising some 60 feet over the flat coastal plain — is exactly what its name says: a sanitary landfill, closed in the 1970s and converted into a park that became the city's front yard, its kite-flying capital, and the answer to a trivia question the whole region knows.
The engineering hides under the grass: a capped waste mound, sealed and vented, landscaped into slopes that generations of kids have rolled down and sledded on the rare snow days. Around it the park accreted the full catalog of suburban recreation — skate park, playgrounds, lakes stocked for fishing, picnic shelters, and the wide festival lawns that host the city's gatherings. Its parking lots serve as the default meeting point of eastern Virginia Beach life.
Trashmore also became a case study cited well beyond the city: proof, decades before 'landfill parks' were a planning fashion, that a waste site's afterlife could be public and green rather than fenced and forgotten. The mound's gas vents and monitoring wells still do their quiet work under the kite fields — the park never pretends the hill is natural, which is part of its honesty and its charm.
In a city this flat, a mountain — any mountain — becomes a landmark. Virginia Beach built hers out of its own trash and then threw picnics on it for fifty years. There are grander monuments. There is no more Virginia Beach one.
