How Green Are Out Brownfields?

By Jane Holtz Kay

The story of the trashing of America is yellowing in the pages of our national history and implanted in every corner of the country. It is a story of urban neighborhoods and workingplaces too old to be re-told. And it goes like this:

The factory in the city burned. Its charred ruins, no longer worth the upkeep, were fenced off and left to waste away into the ravaged neighborhood. The manufactured widget, gizmo, apparatus, product passed into obsolescence, leaving the venerable company bankrupt and persuading its latest, and last, generation to lock the factory doors and skip town. The garment, shoe, fabric-maker fled to another state or country to pursue cheap labor, shuttering the old plant and leaving its underground tanks to leak pollutants into the subsoil and water of the old mill town.

Scarred by the past and lacking promise, the tainted sites create an Urban Hall of Infamy. Worst-case scenarios, they are tarred by their poisons and their past. Abused, abandoned, underused. Packed with PCBs, heavy metals, lead, tetrachloroethylene, and perc; traversed by plumes of oil, they stand in the wrong neighborhood (inner city, minority); with the wrong ancestry (asbestos-encrusted mills, leaky oil tanks, polluting industries from drycleaning to jewelrymaking to battery production). But whatever their contents, their chief crime may be that they attract no builders.

Saving Greenfields

So why would advocates and urbanists, developers and preservationists peruse such orphaned lots? Because, for one reason, these anonymous castoffs now have a name. That name is "Brownfields" and with that designated label and status from the Environmental Protection Agency has come a constituency to give these sullied sites a second look--and life. Mayors and policymakers, builders and environmentalists, private and public sector agents alike have to reclaim these hazardous wastelands. Once the pariahs of preservation and conservation, the stigma of urban existence, these sites could be their saviors.

The word and the concept of restoring "brownfields" can only be understood by considering their opposite: the green fields of America. These so-called greenfields are the virgin lands on the fringes preferred by subdividers; they are the two million acres of farmlands leveled each year, the forests and fields filled with Wal-Marts and Costcos, the wetlands drained for McMansions and gated subdivisions. They are what William Whyte once called The Last Landscape, the last fringe outward succumbing to the sprawl that drains America's Main Streets and urban cores. Cleaning close-in brownfields stops that process.

To be sure, brownfields are hardly new. Preservationists have always dealt with threadbare landscapes, environmentalists always expressed concern, developers looked for ready parcels, mayors cared for their cores. But today's Gulag of brownfields with their environmental hazards and impoverished neighborhoods looked beyond redemption. While preservationists recycled and revived old buildings, and cleanups occurred, these abandoned urban addresses unraveled, eroding further their neighborhoods and compounding the outward drift promoted by federal policies. Enter a new recognition. Enter brownfields. Overnight, it seems, these poisonous places have even become trendy.

"When we started," says Tom Colangelo, managing editor of Brownfield News "people said 'Brownfields?' Is that when the lights go out.'"
"No," Colangelo would respond. "That's brownout."
"Is it farm land?" "Nooo. It's the opposite of green lands." Now it's different. "Our universe has grown every month. You're viewing the explosion of a market. "

The Runaway Reckoning

Statistically, that market--the afflicted corners of the country--consists of more than 400,000 contaminated sites, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO). "Anyone that's located near a brownfield site has a stigma. I think the number may be in the millions," says John Podgurski, head of the New England EPA office, one of ten EPA regions launching the program and channeling efforts to clean them.

These sites range from one lot to the complete state of Rhode Island. They hold a rainbow of pollutants. One may shelter a furnace-stamping machine, another a defunct tannery, a third a ketchup bottle cap maker...any of the smoke stack industries forging, fueling, moving...dumping, polluting contaminating America. "Every site has been used for something and it's contaminated," says Charles Bartsch, a pioneer in the field and senior policy analyst for the Northeast-Midwest Institute.

What is the price for cleanup? "How much would it cost to put all the people in America in good health?" asks Steve Kidney, editor of the Brownfields Report. Some $650 billion, says the GAO. It, too, could be more. "It's hard to quantify," says Kidney. "The definition is so nebulous. It's not like saying how many cars are registered in Illinois." It could also be less, say others, who blame the mere perception of poverty and the unknown as the true stigma.

Whatever the type and tally, a new consciousness that brownfield cleanup could stem the urban exodus has won support for a veritable Baedecker of Poisonous Places "Recyling America's Land," the Conference of Mayors titled a report on 47,384 acres of brownfields last year rating "deadzones" like New York, New Jersey and Chicago high on their cleanup agenda and multiplied support. The reasons are obvious. They are crucial economically, central geographically and vital to the urban neighborhoods they border and to cities short on space. Funds from tax breaks, loans, inventory have escalated the cleanup and re-use. Hopes are high, sites multiplying. England, that tight little island which pioneered in the field, considers virtually every vacant lot a brownfield and a "brownfields first" program has raised downtown retail development 13 percent, according to Building Design. American cities and anti-sprawl advocates have come aboard. And with them developers. "Turn Brown into Green," says one ad in a brownfield magazine. How did this change of complexion occur?

In the Beginning

Brownfields are the child of the post-industrial age. Heading into the last quarter of the 20th century, America's urban catchbasins held the wretched refuse of both America's industry and America's poor and minorities. As the seventies lurched into the environmental age, the air was dirty, the water was dirty, the earth was dirty. Twenty years ago, in 1978, the wastes turning the backyards of Love Canal into "purple lawns" and "multi-color basements" caused New York to declare a state of emergency. The larger nation rallied. Two years later, the EPA launched the corrective: the Superfund legislation of 1980.

To get corporations to launder their dirty landscape, the federal government would make them responsible for undoing their misdeeds. Cleanup or pay the penalty. Alas, the Superfund imperative didn't quite work that way. One-third to 60 percent of the its money went to lawyers for polluters. None of the bankers wanted the old superfund sites. None of the developers. All feared fines. Superfund: Superfailure, was the title of one tract.

In 1986, the EPA amended the unwieldy Superfund act. It eased cleanup standards to fit the future use of the condemned property: That meant requiring a grade A cleanup--zero pollution--for, say, daycare; a grade D cleanup for a parking lot. The construction was on. "Shovels first, lawyers later," went the slogan. "Things changed," says Podgurski. "The fact that we sat at the table with them" was one reason. No hectoring, no fingerwagging. Some financial aid, some relief from legal liability followed. Over time, the EPA shifted 30,000 Superfund sites to brownfield status to coax cooperative cleanup, end fear of lawsuits and stop the wrangling.

Meanwhile, scouting their landscape for fresh sites and finding only worn ones, urban locales began to sign on. In 1988, Minnesota passed the first legislation for voluntary compliance. It was a child without a name or scheme, says Ken Haberman, who helped initiate it. Today, ten years later, eighty percent of U.S. legislatures have passed brownfield bills. Some 221 have received the EPA blessing and $200,000 for pilot projects; 16 followed with "showcase" status, giving them high visibility, some money and technical aid. Agencies from the Corps of Engineers to HUD to Veteran Affairs to a religious partnership at play in the fields of Satan have joined developers in investing time and money to assess, reclaim and upgrade the landscape.

"It's an immediate thing. People can see immediate results," Myron Orfield, the Minnesota representative whose Metropolitics offers a regional solution to downtrodden cities, puts it. "Tax-base sharing takes a while. Land use planning takes years. Brownfields lets people see something that's positive and not a step backwards." Charles Bartsch of the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a pioneer in the field, is equally positive. "We've been working this issue for at least seven years," he says. "The tools are coming together."

"I do volatile organic compounds," says Jane Sherman. "He does history," she nods across the table towards William "Mac" McKenzie Woodward, architectural historian for the Rhode Island Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission. Before us on the wall of the downtown office of the Providence Plan, hangs a map of the meandering Woonasquatucket River Basin where the colleagues will collaborate on one such project-- what might be called a linear brownfield, a poisonous sink of a waterway rolling 4.4 miles through the toxic shores of two low income neighborhoods.

De-polluting Providence

It is a warm early spring day and the roiling stream seems to call from the map as they take turns describing the Greenway project initiated by the Providence Plan. And then we are off. "This is the Woonasquatucket River, "place where the moose water," Sherman picks up our conversation as we drive past the barely visible river. "Grown over," she says, "almost invisible." We pull over and make our way to a path beaten down by the youngsters heedless of the poison ivy or ticks on its banks--or the vivid red and yellow signs ("Peligro...danger!") warning the neighbors of the dioxin-laden city sewage coursing through their community. Check out the riverside, says Sherman, and you might find them playing in the debris dumped illegally, Sherman says, or fishing in the lethal river.

For all the secluded charms of our walk, for all the cozy if worn cottages in this historic milltown, the hazardous materials left by those mills hurt the depressed neighborhood. Forty two percent of Olneyville's children recorded high lead levels. Most of their parents are on their way out. No jobs. No future. The area holds the third highest vacancy rate in the state.

By foot and car, we trace the rock-strewn waters: past mills fallen and mills beaten, by rubbled lots blistering with pollutants yet blessed by the roses that tumble among the pesky knotweed. Blight and beauty coexist in most historic ruins, but brownfields sites may be the most haunting for both the needs of the parishes of their poor and the potential ready to be released.

It will take some doing. For all the photo op townscape, the legacy written in the name "West Bleachery Street" lingers on the project's 15 sites. Some 120,000 gallons of No. 6 fuel oil lace the six-acre tract of the Riverside mill destroyed by a fire almost 10 years ago is. "Molasses, heavy stuff," says Woodward. They must go. Across the river to the west bordering Merino Park, at the burned out Lincoln Lace & Braid rivulets of oil drip into the water of its 9-acre site. "That's tank heaven," down there, says Woodward as we stand beneath two rust-stained sofas dangling from the dead trees. All around us other discards reflect how the abandonment draws drug dealers. "As long as you don't have eyes here, you're going to have more crime," says Woodward.

Enter the brownfields focus. The bad news is that it will cost $500,000 to clean the site. The good news is that 60 percent of the area lies in public hands, a benefit to the community once reclaimed. With $200,000 gone to assess the soil and partnerships with HUD and the Corps of Engineers secured, and plans drawn, redevelopment could add 20 to 100 new jobs here, plus link to 13 other sites in the riverfront restoration, says Sherman.

Striding along the riverway, her graying dark hair tied loosely behind her head, her conviction palpable, Sherman sees beyond the battered buildings and fading memories to the shared future shaped at community meetings. "Everybody had a story to tell, of water where they went to talk or read or think," she recalls one meeting. "It really brought home the need for quiet, for nature in the neighborhood. The people are lucky because we really have something they can use if we can open it up." Instead of the ravaged edges, Sherman sees shaped space. A canoe run. A walkway. A bike path connected to the East Coast Greenway. She sees almost half the people of the inner core now denied mobility given decent public transportation and access to jobs rising from the toxic ashes of the past.

"This is a real perspective shift serving a population that has not been seen aligned with environmental issues except with environmental justice," says Woodward. Critics have long blamed environmentalists and preservationists for wearing blinders, closing institutional eyes to the poor. Brownfields programs help remove them.

Raising Questions of Quality

But not everywhere. While any brownfield upgrade beats a greenfield downgrade, not all makeovers are Cinderella stories. "Grow, Grow, Grow," says one real estate investment trust (REIT) advertisement. But how grow? "Ready, Set, Clean Up," says another. But how clean? To what end? Brownfields are real estate with a nasty past--a barren landscape "with a bad rep," says Deborah Brown of Boston College, a lawyer with the Institute for Responsible Management. Ruin lies on the land but also in the eye of the beholder. Often a light dusting will do the job. The real issue to confront, says Brown, is the racism and poverty that stigmatize the site and lead to no or bad development.

Weeks later under an overcast sky, Ken Haberman, a pioneer in Minnesota's brownfields guides me by the twin city makeovers he has helped orchestrate. Moving in an arc around reclaimed sites, with pauses to chat with the agents of their cleanup, a rueful expression occasionally crosses his round face beneath its dark hair and wire glasses as we look at the new-minted vista of office parks, some improved, some dubious.

Our takeoff point, the surroundings of Williams Hill and Swede Hollow, are multi-ethnic districts with small bungalows and older homes now cleaned and given new businesses. Our end destination, Minneapolis, boasts an abundance of splendid edifices; landscapes once pickled with printing chemicals, laced with lead, or housing 200 drums of toxic waste, are now refurbished. Yet, the eye doesn't always greet their replacements gladly. Commandeered by the St. Paul Port Authority, the development agency, they hold low, suburban-style business parks. Fronted with cars, seldom served by sidewalks, they resemble the sterile corporate quarters that abrade the vanishing countryside A backhoe edges near some old buildings at Moxon Steel as we watch. For every attractive railroad station given pollution grants (the Milwaukee Depot), for every robust Washburn Crosby Mill and silo attended to, a besieged Stroh Brewery awaits: richly robust architecture "chock full of asbestos" -- and facing a dubious high noon.

Nonetheless, if Kodak moments are few, our daylong tour of industrial or commercial sites made new encompasses true brownfields goals. Lots where vandals once grubbed, gang fights percolated and gunshots sounded in the evening air, reveal workingplaces with well-groomed space for the community. Cleanup has slowed desertion of the neighborhood, stopped sprawl, strengthened the historic core, added to the urban tax base and enlivened their neighborhoods.

The Business Corps

"Jobs in the inner city prevent sprawl," says Mike Strand as we sit in the sleek offices of the St. Paul Port Authority. Seated beside him before the wide corporate windows overlooking the Mississippi, Lorrie Louder, the agency's hard-hitting director of industrial development, concurs. No deserted downtowns, no wasted infrastructure serving cul-de-sacs. Direct and dynamic, Louder wields the brownfield tool. Part wand, part whip she shapes up developers projects, all for one aim: to prop the population that calls St. Paul's neighborhoods home. By stabilizing industry on these sites, the authority buttresses the inner city community.

"We crank out jobs," Louder has put it. "A thousand Brownfield acres equals 13 million buildable square feet," one document declares. "But, more importantly, it means 13,000 new living wage jobs, and $25 million annually in new property tax revenues." By demanding $9-an-hour wages, by recyling urban land, by leveraging public funds to attract private ones, the agency advances its inner city agenda. Preservation amenities or not, "in the last three years, we've probably developed 1000 acres," says Louder. . "Before these laws, nobody would touch these sites," says Jeffrey Strand. The supervisor of delinquent taxpayer sites who has restored the contaminated properties of auto parts yards or the acid-laden grounds of a metal manufacturer for the Minneapolis Community Development Agency

There's less and less of "there's an old tract take it down," Brownfield News editor Colangelo sums the brownfield impact. "There's huge community participation. It's a real estate transaction with an environmental twist." "In one sense, I think it's different from other real estate deals," says Steve Kidney of Brownfields Report, "because no matter what happens to a brownfield site, it's going to be an improved environment." The neighborhood will be cleaner, healthier and more vigorous. Simultaneously, the fringes will be greener. "The alternate," Kidney reminds us, is to cut down a cornfield and build a highway.

Cleaning a brownfield site is not easy. It is a multi-disciplinary exercise that begins with assessments and excavations as arduous as an archaeological dig. First, there is the search for the history to document the pollution of the past. Next, the actual soil sampling, testing, boring --- to discover the state of the surface soil, yard by yard in the present. Then, the subsoil, bedrock and groundwater below. Finally, there is the actual clean up, the complexities of, say, a Tacoma smelter site lined with arsenic or pipes flushed with PCBs. Questions shoulder every step? Should they be carted away ("muck and truck")? Should there be bio-remediation--airsparging, nutrient injecting of the friendly bacteria? Price tags vary. Hidden surprises erupt. How do developers protect themselves from liability today and tomorrow? How should the public's present and future use be guaranteed? Who supervises the supervisors? The American Bar Association's "Brownfields: A Complete Guide to Redeveloping Contaminated Property." runs to 703 wrist-breaking pages.

Back and Forth with Brownfields

All these steps are imbued with controversy. "The big battle between the environmental groups is the extent to which the site should be cleaned and what should decide that. Controls are inadequate," says Debra Knopman of the Progressive Policy Institute. What's still on the surface? What's trickling down. What gets cleaned? Will a second generation of pollutants appear?

Alexandra Dawson, a long time environmental attorney, applauds the concept but flags the possible consequences. Sure, it's fine to clean the property today, she says. What about tomorrow, though? Who is responsible for birth defects, for cancer? How clean is clean? Clean enough for a parking lot? Clean enough for a hospital. A problem. If the key is to tie the end use to the level of cleanup, that tie-in is not always easy. "Say they put a cap on it," Dawson says. "Then, the next owners put a basement through the cap. That can happen." "A catch me if you can attitude," The Wall Street Journal reported "I see things that make me chill out. I don't want us to give away our future," says Dawson.

Marc Landy, a professor of politics at Boston College and author of EPA Asking the Wrong Questions" calls such questions the daycare-in-the-cellar syndrome: "if someday, someone opens a day care in the basement and ..." his voice trails off. Such problems can be solved by deed restrictions. "It does get complicated." If it wins for the environment and it wins for economic development, the complexity is health, Landy concedes. "But for those of us who are preservation-minded, we have to love brownfields."

"There's a lot of politics going on in Detroit around this," Jeff Gearhart of the Ecology Center describes the paving over of toxic sites for casinos. "Preservationsts hit the wall when they saw them on the river." Beyond the less than optimal use of the space, Geary objects to breaks for polluters. "We give them tax breaks and make the city pay. People have been let off the hook Where are these polluters? They've left the mess and left town. Where is the environmental justice here? It's a safe non-controversial program," says Gearhart. "It's pro-business. The EPA likes it because it makes states and business people happy. It's fashionable among environmentalists. In a fundamental, moral way, I don't believe this is the policy we should have."

Other environmentalists remind us that we need brownfields prevention at least as much as reclamation, that pollution and willful neglect are ongoing. As industry "browns" new fields, these stewards call for so-called close-loop solutions. "One person's waste is another person's raw material," Jim Schwab, author of A Deeper Shade of Green, repeats the recycling axiom. We should be advocating to stop new polluting industries while taking on the formidable task of cleaning old ones.

"The fact is there are so many brownfields that if you look at literally both sides of the track from Boston to Baltimore, seventy percent is brownfields," Kidney observes. And the priority is there: Fill around those tracks, infill those cities and you shrink the funds for infrastructure outwards--and more pollution like car emissions. "After all," says the ABA advisory document, "the risk to the average commuter of being killed in a car accident is significantly greater than the risk of developing cancer from years of exposure to a mildly contaminated site."

For all the Cinderella stories, brownfields provoke questions for preservationists, too. A ballbearing plant turned into the monoculture of a golf course....A new big box store that fills a waste dump competing like any other big box store, with main street...A highway ramp crashing down an old mill to allow access to "open space" and parking to "rescue" its adjacent mills. Chicago, say, reveals both pluses (the dedication of the former Joliet Iron Works Historic Site on the ruins of coke ovens along the Canal Corridor one August) and minuses (the wastes of a toxic site mounded into an urban hillock too high to be accessible for its low-income housing). These, like other "Lessons from the Field" assembled by the Northeast Midwest Institute, could use the keen eye, and efforts, of preservationists and planners.

Mediocrity on the Merrimac

Consider Lowell, Massachusetts, that Eldorado on the Merrimack, another "showcase" city. America's great industrial birthplace, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year as the nation's first urban park looking far better than it has in decades. To see the polyglot vitality of this city of 105,000, observe the streetlife of students, shoppers, tourist, residents mingling at the bus stop in the late afternoon sun. In Downtown Lowell, you can get a taste of Saigon or a French meal, a Burger King bite or a Barnes & Noble cappuccino. Visit a barber, a shoemaker, or a gift shop for the tourists who fill the once empty stores along Central Street.

Paces away chief planner, Anne Barton takes us on Lowell's "before" and "after" brownfield tour. Sitting behind her dreamboat Chevy, Barton begins at the Northern Canal Area near the post office not far from Downtown. Papers on front seat, we check off sites one and two: a duo of second string ("take me out to the minors") sports stadiums. "Paul E. Tsongas Arena," says the first, named for the congressman who launched Lowell's National Park. Here a former mill site laced with lead, oil and organic waste site was cleaned for a million dollars; then turned into hockey league locale for $23 million more (with an extra 4 million for landscaping). The benefit of the project, says Barton, life to city. A second former ash dump and junkyard was turned into yet another second string sports stadium, a baseball park: a million for cleanup $15 for the park. Two samples of what authors Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause and others call a Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit. Conclusion: Not a great start. Can't brownfields do better than this cliche of urban comeback?

Though no rocket-science renewal launched our safari, there is much to commend other brownfield projects. The revitalized Currier Printing buildings, broken down into cozy doorways, a 90,000 square feet contaminated brick building now offer social programs, day care, parent and elderly services to the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association Project serving the second largest percentage of Asian population in the country. Less happily, intrusive angle parking juts out from the Gateway Center's brownfield makeover disrupting the walkable flow of the Downtown sidewalk. Doesn't it violate the canon of urban design? "The developers said they couldn't lease the property without the parking," Barton accepts the 1960's car-based market "wisdom."

"You do the best you can," Peter Aucella comments another day, and not too happily, as he describes the fate of the Gilmore Trust, a 1920s building crumbling to extinction after 15 or 20 years of abuse. The assistant superintendent for building at the Lowell National Park recalls the city's road to neglect to remind you of "how far we've come," citing the cooperative Lowell Plan, the progress of brownfields and, less happily, the long wait for payout of brownfields status, $2.8 million. "There are spots all over town," Aucella describes toxic zones of this land-poor, impoverished mill town. The Lawrence Mills area, for just one, holds 9 fuel tanks, two with 250,000 gallons of oil apiece, 75 with 25. "The jury's out on how effective it's going to be," he says.

Bringing Brimstone Back

If ever a city had turned a fire and brimstone city into a preservation testimony, it is Butte, Montana. A place where the perception of poisons matches their reality, the copper-mining hilltown which billed itself as the "Gibraltar of Unionism" and the "richest hill on earth" possesses enough condemned acreage to secure Superfund status from Butte to Missoula. The Superfund terra firma, created by geology and industry alike, is a muck of God-given and man-made wastes. The mile-wide "lake" of its Berkeley Pit is so toxic that swooping geese perish from a gulp. Its terraced peaks look dead as a copper penny. The widespread tailings from its mines would fill Noxious Wastes 101--qualifying more for an Edge-of-apocalypse Achievement pin than Butte's 1962 National Historic Landmark designation.

Not, however, to Mark Reavis. The preservationist at the helm of Butte's deliverance sees the city as nothing less than the symbol of working America. To Reavis, that world --a wasted world which has "drawn from the earth its mercury, lead, zinc, uranium, fluorsper, phosphate, nickel, molybdenum, manganese, iron, lithium, tin, copper, silver and gold," (as John McPhee once has it) -- is worth preserving. It is, in his words, a monument to "a societal decision...the quest for minerals"-- from rings for the rich to copper wiring for the nation's electricity. It is, he will remind you, as will all those who view such exhalings and extractions, the ongoing reality.

Recording the history behind that reality is the calling of this bearded, burly director of the Butte-Silver Bow project. To this architect who does everything from fielding calls on street trees to shaping affordable housing on reclaimed land. Placing plaques and securing buildings for a population of 35,000 which triples with summer tourists, he struggles to review the district. "It's been a hard switch to turn this town around but it's a landmark," Reavis says.

Beneath the historic iron headframes, striking erector-set iron structures which carried the miners to and from their underground digging, marks the dynamic past. The bygone logo of the carpenter's union, etched into a comely 19th century granite building, still scores one of many vigorous structures that attest to the glory days of labor. The burnished brick and stone buildings, some trashed into parking lots, many, like the courthouse, still stately and intact, recall the past's prosperity.

But it is the poisoned leftovers, the giant thumbprint of Anaconda copper, that stimulated cleanup from the arsenic that preserved the timbers in the owner's mine shaft, to the dust that filled the front yards of their workers' families. And both Brownfield cleanup moneys and Superfund shackles on Arco, the last owners, remediated this tract. "We've moved nearly a million cubic yards of waste in yards," says Sarah Weinstock, the EPA's long grayhaired, jean-clad project manager who grew up here. "Maybe it would be better just to empty out the town," she says, but only half-heartedly before she goes on. "They moved 27 houses. It was horrendous on the people."

Perhaps, it would indeed be easier easy to evict the families, to pave over the past, to drive them out, out--say--to the Butte Silver Bow service strip, a veritable chain valley, blurred into a sorry lot of Arby'sBurgerKingMcDonaldHolidayInns.+406-723-8262. But how much more poisonous is this place than the perimeter poisoned by new mineral extractions and the contamination of expansion? If it's not easy being green, the housing built on the site of the scooped-up toxic soil slowly rises: courtesy federal money, money from city sources and money from putting the squeeze on Arco. The relationship between the city, the new, still extracting Montana Natural Resources and Arco whose slick catalogue is studded with references to "Mother Nature" and the Jack Nicklaus golf course atop a former waste site is hardly a love fest.

Nor, for that matter, is the relationship between the environmentalists and preservations a love fest. "Civil actions" and preservation actions are beset with friction here. "I'm always trying to preserve and they're trying to clean up," Reavis describes his EPA colleague stonily. "And we're not always the best of friends."

For all the in-house agitation, however; for all the antipathy to copper producers, the space tells a rare story. These geological surrounds, however grotesque, still possess a nefarious beauty in their earthly remains. The moonscapes made out of the spectacle of carnage combine with the story of the town that copper built in preservation labors. Funds have gone to a former hoisting center now a senior citizen hall and a visitor center overlooking the bizarre spectacle of the Berkeley Pit. Embodied in this Anaconda-Butte Heritage Corridor, they limn one of the more evocative pages of history.

Standing atop the flat stonework built to cap Butte's toxic pie and transforms it into a plaza, visitors can view the distant heaves of pulverized land stretching into the distance, then squint down at the squares of bricks with the signatures of Butte's citizens who funded it. The memorial built with brownfields money solemnizes an early century fire whose fumes ravaged the community. But the monument is moving. Placards fence its perimeter with silhouettes lining the railing to tell the tale. One miner's last words were scribbled on a piece of paper found in his pocket. "We could hear the rocks falling," he wrote his wife awaiting their first child. The daughter of that then-unborn child came to the opening, says Reavis, touched by the ongoing life helped by cleanup in this worn out town.

Success indeed seems to ride the rails in brownfields cleanups. America's moving cargoes left a deadly residue in the ground around nineteen century depots and, across the country, and many have become sites for reclamation. Nowhere, though, is a brownfields-cum-preservation project moving at greater velocity than around the two stations in Salt Lake City. Here, dominated by the Mormon Temple, at the foot of the distant mountains on the edge of Downtown, the city is moving at full gallop to turn the neighborhood sooted, polluted by the railroad early in this century a pedestrian gateway community for the next one.

For generations, the Gateway District's promising but careworn environs framed the gilt-edged Union Pacific and Denver and Rio Grande depots. Inherited by a scruffy and transient community, conditions declined. Weedy tracks held mostly freight cars. Grim highway bridges plunged into the midst of pauper housing and polluted warehouses. Institutions for the needy drew drifters and derelicts while dirty industries--car parts, scrap metal and classic junkyards--contaminated 50 percent of the property and discouraged newcomers. "If you had purchased a building, they would have had you take a breath test," says realtor/developer Jim Lewis.

And, yet, despite the blemishes from summit to slope, Salt Lake City's draws were many. Space on its downtown sites was stretched to the limit with nowhere to go but the packed neighborhoods. While some of the population made a suburban exodus, makeovers the chic Lakota restaurant in the Dakota lofts building and renewal of Pioneer Park for its 100th anniversary provoked an urban comeback. As the '90's ended, a civic-minded citizenry, planners, preservationists, and Mayor Deedee Corradini ("a dynamo," says one fan) surveyed new options. A 23-mile north-south light rail link was in the works for 2000; the Winter Olympics on the docket for 2002. Union Pacific was consolidating its tracks and releasing acreage behind its station for development. And, with it all, was its listing as the priority brownfields project.

"This area had been left off our radar screens," planning director William T. Wright of the Salt Lake City Corporation describes the debased 34-block, 650 acre island of today's Gateway District. Alice Larkin Steiner, director of the city's redevelopment agency drives our van filled with a quartet of participants, as we pass oddlot buildings taken on by the city with brownfields funds. "They've definitely made a difference," says Kirk Huffaker, community services director for the Utah Heritage Foundation describes the "hurdle" such help overcome. "Part de-mystifying, part clean-up," Lois Young, brownfields project coordinator continues, describing the process to assess sites from the Fuller Paint Building, more a perceived than a real problem; to Utah Barrel, a salvage yard packing mercury, cadmium, and arsenic just for starters among 12 sites included.

"The brownfields pilot money has enabled us to consider environmental issues up front in the planning process," Young continues on another day. "By doing sampling and research, we are able to consider health risks. It insures helps good planning--proper placement, cleanup plans and liability information, giving the private sector the tools to facilitate development." It's a market approach more grounded in reality," she says. "we could have really slowed down development by years. We're demystifying the issues so we can move on."

And move they must as the Olympics put this ravaged landscape on the fast track. "As you look, you've got to put on your vision glasses," Wright observes. "All this will be gone," Young says enthusiastically, as we look towards one of the two nearby viaducts to be downed two blocks short of the city in what one might call the ultimate brownfield eradication. (Alas, they are accompanied by a $l.4 billion freeway widening which, less happily, one might call a brownfield creation.)

Nonetheless, the goodies grow--a street-calming green boulevard, like Commonwealth Avenue "to put a sense of place," says Wright; an intermodal hub to hold a mix of transportation services; housing convenient to rail plus the usual suspects--restaurants, cultural, civic, schools, entertainment, offices and retail spots. The Utah Heritage Foundation has signed on to insure the protection of historic structures in the Warehouse Historic District which boasts the Albert Kahn Motor Company Building, the Denver and Rio Grande Freight Houses anchoring the site. "There's a lot of fabulous buildings," says Huffaker. "We're definitely raising awareness." How fast, he isn't sure.

Other concerns plague Salt Lake City, not only the taint of the recent Olympic scandal but the effects of a carpe diem doublespeed finish in time for its opening. The fear of too much control of land by big developers, too much parking, too little support for vulnerable inhabitants, and the risk that the old Main Street will fall to the pull of new growth trouble many. "The Golden Goose," the Salt Lake Tribune headlined the development, "hope" and "heartburn." "A cultural necklace," said the mayor. Both exist in all these projects.

Yet for all the staple real estate troubles, the drive here as elsewhere could transform America's urban wastelands into greenfields and good earth. The hope that the railroad that raised the barriers on the "other side of the tracks" can raze the barriers of its brownfields is heartening--and typical of brownfields programs that promise a heartening departure from America's way of trash and leave. Hope mixed with heartbreak. The same applies to brownfields across America. The "heartbreak" is already written in their besmirched and sodden landscapes. The "hope" that these polluting pockets can be razed by brownfield labors and elevated by new energies is evidenced in the constituencies enlisted.

From coast to coast, the larger faith that such scouring of brownfields can end greenfield destruction, can elevate urban America and clean the environment is manifest and promising. "What good is a house when you don't have a tolerable planet to build on it," Thoreau said famously. If Civil Action has given everyday Americans a sense of the degradation of America's environment, this civic cleanup action is a chance to transform America's wasted urban backyards into gateways for their future and the planet's.

Condensed versions of the following appeared in In These Times and Conservation Matters.

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