Situated along the Mississippi River, Rock Island, Illinois, used to be a lumber hub where logs arrived for the mill. Later came Farmall Tractor building tractors. When it closed, in came another industry and then another.
In May, the once-industrial patch of land opened again, this time as the first phase of a children’s garden with grasses that dance in the wind, brown cypress trees and alders.
The new children’s garden is the result of a partnership between the city and the nonprofit Quad City Botanical Center and is an example of how communities across the country are cleaning up brownfields and toxic sites and transforming them into parks.
In Rock Island, the botanical center entered a long-term lease with the city, allowing the center to run the garden and make improvements, says William Nelson, parks and recreation director. The city used its standing as a government agency to apply for federal and state grants specifically targeting brownfield cleanups, which nonprofits often can’t access on their own. The center took on the role of raising required matching funds and other donations as well as overseeing the construction.
The first phase of the garden was about an acre. The fully completed 2.5-acre project, which will include a building, is expected to cost about $10 million, says Ami Jenkins, executive director of the center.
Rock Island is a revenue-dependent city, Nelson says. With any project it takes on, it weighs if the community will pay for programming. Partnering with the garden not only alleviated some of the city’s financial burden, it also cleaned a blighted area that serves as an entryway to the city.
Cleaning up land that is going to become a park means meeting the most stringent guidelines for remediation, says Molly Newell, owner and president of EnviroNET Inc., which handled the cleanup. Her company assesses the hazards on sites, identifying present and future contaminants, and designs plans, like removing soil, and building barriers between contaminated soil and the surface.
Cleaning up toxic sites is becoming more common as communities realize these sites can be made safe.
“Some cities are afraid to buy contaminated property, but I tell them there is a way to clean things up,” she says.
One important aspect of cleaning up apaces is funding. Most cities that clean up toxic sites for parks work with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has provided grants and technical assistance for remediating brownfields since 2001, says David R. Lloyd, director of the office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization.
Cleaning up these sites is almost always a public and private partnership with the communities using federal grant money administered by the EPA and leveraging it for additional private funding in the community, he says. The EPA has helped with funding parks across the country, from Manchester Street Park in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at a site that once housed a municipal trash incinerator, to Grijalva Park in Orange, California, where a 42-acre green space replaced closed landfills on a former railroad site
Cities are going to continue cleaning up former industrial sites for parks, especially in urban areas where there aren’t options for new developments, says Scott Dvorak, the Newark, New Jersey, program director with the Trust for Public Land.
The trust partnered with the city of Newark to clean up a nine-acre space where a metal pickling plant used to operate and which the city acquired in 1970. For years, the space that would become Nat Turner Park sat as an empty field.
“It’s New Jersey, it’s urban and there is ubiquitous contamination,” Dvorak says. “You dig up people’s yards and there is some contamination in it. It’s the historic legacy of the region.”
Remediation found buried tanks in the ground, so soil had to be tested and removed and barriers built between the new soil and subsurface. Much of the almost $3 million used for the cleanup was paid through the state’s brownfield program offering matching grants. About 20 different funding sources helped pay for the total $8.5 million cost.
On projects like this, the trust manages the funds, design and construction. When it’s time for the ribbon cutting, the city takes over park management, Dvorak says. When Nat Turner Park opened in July 2009, it was the city’s largest park, complete with a quarter-mile track, soccer fields, park benches and playground equipment. The project was so successful that the city and the trust partnered again, this time to create Riverfront Park.
In the early 1900s, jewelry makers used smelters in the area along what is now Newark’s Riverfront Park. The seven acres that will be the new park also sit near the Morris Canal, a key transportation corridor before railroads became the main mode of transportation in the area. The site is also about a mile away from a plant that produced Agent Orange.
Tests showed no dioxin — the chemical that makes exposure to Agent Orange so harmful — in the area, but there were bricks, platforms and soil contaminated by metals to remove. The first 3.5 acres of the park opened in 2013, costing $6.6 million for construction and cleanup.The trust is working on cleaning up and building the other half of the park.
Cleaning up toxic sites is expensive and can often be logistically challenging as plans and timelines change depending on tests and excavations of sites. However, creating parks on former industrial sites is happening across the country. It’s especially common in dense urban areas like Newark where there isn’t a lot of land, but people especially need parks, Dvorak says.
One neighborhood near the new Riverfront Park used to have only .5 acres of open space per 1,000 residents, when normally the goal is seven acres, Dvorak says.
“There’s no other place to get the recreational land, and green space and parks are important for quality of life,” he says.
Communities without the density issues of Newark also find that some of the most-prized parkland is worth the work required to restore it.
For years, Lansing, Michigan’s biggest park sat quiet and unused. In the 1950s through the early 1970s, FMC Corp. fabricated agriculture sprayers and firefighting equipment that they tested, spraying orchards and igniting and extinguishing fires, on a swath of land that would eventually become Crego Park, a jewel in the city’s park system, says Brett Kaschinske, the city’s parks director.
In 1973, the city bought the land from the corporation. It made a perfect expansion of adjacent park land and provided a 15-acre lake that people started using immediately for boating. But in 1986, drums of paint sludge and toxins were discovered in the park and later in the lake, Kaschinske says. When the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the county health department investigated, they found chemicals on the site. The park closed and the corporation performed an $8 million environmental cleanup that included soil removal, water testing and removal of the drums. The park stayed closed, even after the cleanup was completed in the 1990s.
City officials knew they wanted to reopen it as a park, but they needed funds, Kaschinske shared. Grants from state agencies allowed the city to install benches, a fishing pier, launch sites for kayaks and canoes, a parking lot and pathways connecting the park to the city’s larger trail system.
Crego Park opened this summer with families paddleboarding, boating and fishing on the water (fish were tested for contaminants before the park opened). The 200-acre park is already a focal point in the city.
For many communities, it’s about getting those funds to get the land cleaned up and infrastructure built. Someday, Miami-Dade County park staff hope a soccer field will sit where there once was a landfill. The Florida neighborhood where a landfill used to operate needs soccer fields, says Jorge L. Moor, chief of design, construction and maintenance with the county.
The designated brownfield site is closed while the county tries to find partners to help with the construction costs and even operate the facility once finished. It’s common for the county to partner with the private sector, Moor says. “We do that all the time with certain parks.”
The county has experience with cleaning up contaminated parks. In 2011, chance testing found high concentrations of lead in the soil at Olinda Park. It took months and about $2 million to remove soil and add fill and a surface barrier as well as reconstruct the park. The park reopened last summer with a clean bill of health and kids swarming the new play equipment.
In Rock Island, the addition of the children’s garden is great for the botanical center, but Jenkins, the director, says it’s also important to her as a community resident.
“The before and after of the site and quality and conditions of the land — it was just a stunning change to the landscape,” she says. “We all want the communities where we live to be beautiful and accessible and awe-inspiring.”
The children’s garden features water-play elements and plantings that give a strong sense of place — all found along the Mississippi River. It’s also designed to encourage intergenerational play and get people of all ages unplugged and outside.
“I think humans are designed to be outdoors a whole lot more than we are,” she says. “This helps.”
Kelsey Dayton is a freelance writer based in Missoula, Montana.