STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — What’s old is news.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani ceremonially opened a time capsule Wednesday, 50 years to the day former Mayor Abraham Beame and a delegation of local officials placed it in the cornerstone of the Port Richmond Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility.
“It’s incredible to see a time capsule from 50 years ago and see the words from Mayor Beame and what his hopes were for our city,” Mamdani said following a tour of the facility. “We’ve seen advances since 1976, but there’s still work to be done.”
A pair of Staten Islanders, both workers at the Port Richmond plant, actually opened the metal box time capsule earlier this year as they prepared for ongoing work at the facility, but said they kept the contents as they were to make sure Mamdani was the first to review them.
Richard Mazza, an Annadale resident who serves as plant chief, and Muhammad Amin, a Westerleigh resident who serves as deputy chief, unsealed the box around February after getting tipped off about its existence.
“I made the decision not to look in it because when they said it was a letter for the mayor, I was hesitant because I wanted to make sure he was the first,” Mazza said.
Richard Mazza and Mohammed Amin, staff at the Port Richmond Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility, pose for a photo next to a 50-year-old time capsule left at the plant Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026.(Advance/SILive.com | Paul Liotta)
The opening of the sewage treatment plant in 1976 marked a milestone in the city’s efforts to address its severely-polluted waterways.
The modern Port Richmond sewage treatment plant operated by the Department of Environmental Protection has nearly 50 facility staff and serves about 200,000 Staten Islanders.
Mamdani’s time capsule visit Wednesday also served as an announcement for a $185 million capital project to modernize the Staten Island facility. Much of the equipment in Port Richmond doesn’t look like it’s seen much of an upgrade since then.
“A lot of the equipment that is being used here is still equipment that’s being used from 1976,” Mamdani said, crediting plant workers’ ingenuity for helping the plant stay running. “We want to make their job a little less tough by ensuring that they’re dealing with the very best of what today has to offer.”
A rendering shows plans for the future Port Richmond Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility thanks in part to a $185 million investment.(Courtesy: New York City Department of Environmental Protection)
The Port Richmond Wastewater facility, located on the Richmond Terrace waterfront near the street’s intersection with Dongan Street, has seen a number of multi-million dollar investments over the years, including a $30 million project completed in 2015 that brought a new solar roof and new boilers to the facility.
Construction of the plant began in 1972 when sewage ran freely through the city’s waters and even made its way onto the beaches of Long Island.
The Port Richmond plant is part of a five-borough network of 14 plants that process about 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater daily helping keep the city’s waterways clean.
Efforts to clean the city’s waterways have largely been successful with the Department of Environmental Protection touting the cleanest waterways in over a century, largely thanks to the wastewater treatment plants.
Mayor Abe Beame places a letter, addressed to the mayor of 2026, inside a time capsule inserted in the cornerstone of the Port Richmond Sewage Treatment Plant.(Staten Island Advance/Frank J. Johns)
Mamdani found a host of articles in the time capsule on the past’s water pollution, and a letter from the city’s first Jewish mayor, Beame, to the first Muslim to hold the title about hopes for the future.
“We look forward to a very-near future in which we, ourselves, will be able to use rivers and beaches, which at one time, were unfit for swimming, fishing, or other recreation,” Beame, who died in 2001, wrote in the 1976 letter. “We are doing all we can, despite a current period of governmental austerity, to leave you a legacy of a clean and beautiful environment.”
Other contents of the time capsule included the Oct. 21, 1976 edition of the Staten Island Advance, a 1976 coin collection, and copies of the Port Richmond plant’s blueprints.
Front page headlines from the Advance edition found in the time capsule included reporting on fundraising for Staten Island cultural institutions, utility rate hikes, and the high price tag of the 1976 State Senate race between former State Sen. John Marchi and former Borough President Ralph Lamberti, about $20,000 a piece.
For a hypothetical time capsule of his own, Mamdani focused on memorabilia from the recent Knicks title run and said he’d like to leave behind his own collection of news clippings for the later readers.
“I would love to just get copies of papers from across the city, put them in that capsule because it really gives you a sense of a moment in time,” the mayor said.