Inside the Park View Inn

[stephendare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-cadmium_battery

These batteries were primarily used in medical equipment starting in the mid 50s

[stephendare]

To fully assess the site, private commercial properties in the surrounding area may need to be assessed and it is my understanding that the State is currently pushing the owners to perform the necessary work.    Once the investigation has been completed we will be better able to determine what the options are for addressing the contamination and estimate a schedule for the cleanup of the Park.

This paralells what Robert has said exactly.

[thelakelander]

I stopped in the library this afternoon to check the old city directories.

Citizen's Gas Light Company was established in 1874.  S.B. Hubbard was the president and the head office was located on Pine Street (now Main) on the present day site of the Bostwick Building.  The gas works plant was located where the Park View now sits.  However, the gas works plant does not show up in the city directories after 1896, so it must have ceased operation around that time.  I don't know when the plant was demolished, but I would not be suprised if it was a casualty of the Great Fire of 1901.

I also checked what was located on the site during the early 1920s.  By this time, this area had become automobile central.  The Park View site was the home of Atlantic Tire, Super Service Garage, Robertson-Mckee Motor Co., Indiana Truck Corp., Lovejoy Sales Co. and National Plating Workshop.  Claude Nolan Cadillac was located on the block immediately to the south and the block immediately to the east.  The old red brick warehouses on Orange were used for automobile repair, service, paint and body shops.  Also in 1921, the block just to the west was occupied by Marmon Motor Cars.

[stephendare]

So it would be safe to assume that the maximum time that the gas works was open was from 1874 to 1896.  22 years.  And the plant ceased operation 112 years ago. 

If Van Winkels position is correct and 20 years of the plants operation was not gassification, then the amount of time that the 'blob' might have accumulated from 'gassification' would be even briefer.

Well at least we have a bit more in the 'factual' arena to work with now.

Thanks Lake for taking the time.   That took only one day?

[stephendare]

National Plating?  I wonder if that would have been Nickel Plating?

[thelakelander]

So it would be safe to assume that the maximum time that the gas works was open was from 1874 to 1896.  22 years.  And the plant ceased operation 112 years ago. 

If Van Winkels position is correct and 20 years of the plants operation was not gassification, then the amount of time that the 'blob' might have accumulated from 'gassification' would be even briefer.

Well at least we have a bit more in the 'factual' arena to work with now.

Thanks Lake for taking the time.   That took only one day?

It only took about 45 minutes of serious looking.  The rest of my time was spent looking at old downtown master plans, city photo albums and Klutho books. 

There were not many environmental regulations during that time.  A few years of gassification could be more than enough to pollute a site with no environmental regulations in place.  However, I would be just as concerned about contamination as a result of auto repair and painting shops in the general area that date back from the 1920s.  I'm going to have to do a little more study on National Plating.  At this point, I have no idea on what they were doing in that building, which was located on the corner of Main & Orange.

[stephendare]

A little more information about Coal Gassification and related subjects.

By the way, although I spent many many hours over the two years that I lived in Seattle, in Gas Works Park, I never realized until today that it was a Coal Gassification Plant.

Today its one of Seattle's coolest parks and most well known destinations for travellers world wide.



For people interested in the process of "Coal Gassification", today the technology is touted as one of the great hopes of clean green energy, so its not very helpful for the context of the park to look up modern applications.  Instead, I found this great link on Wikipedia on "TownGas" that explains what gassification plants of the type that this building may have featured were actually like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_gas

There is also a complete list of possible environmental pollutants which would have resulted from the various methods of Coal Gassification at the bottom of the article.

[stephendare]

Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington is a 19.1 acre (77,000 m²) public park on the site of the former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant, located on the north shore of Lake Union at the south end of the Wallingford neighborhood. Gas Works park contains remnants of the sole remaining coal gasification plant in the US. The plant, which operated from 1906 to 1956, was purchased by the City of Seattle for park purposes in 1962, and the park was opened to the public in 1975. The park was designed by Seattle landscape architect Richard Haag, who won the American Society of Landscape Architects Presidents Award of Design Excellence for this project. It was originally named Myrtle Edwards Park after the city councilwoman who had spearheaded the drive to acquire the site and who died in a car crash in 1969. In 1972 the Edwards family requested that her name be taken off the park because the design called for the retention of much of the plant. In 1976, Elliott Bay Park was renamed Myrtle Edwards Park.

Gas Works Park incorporates numerous pieces of the old plant. Some stand as ruins, while others have been reconditioned, painted, and incorporated into a children's "play barn" structure, constructed in part from what was the plant's exhauster-compressor building. A Web site affiliated with The Seattle Times newspaper says, "Gas Works Park is easily the strangest park in Seattle, and may rank among the strangest in the world."

Gas Works Park also features an artificial kite-flying hill with an elaborately sculptured sundial built into its summit. The park was for many years the exclusive site of a summer series of "Peace Concerts." [1] These concerts are now shared out among several Seattle parks. The park also hosts one of Seattle's two major Fourth of July fireworks events. The park is the traditional end point of the Solstice Cyclists and the start point for Seattle's World Naked Bike Ride.

The park originally constituted one end of the Burke-Gilman bicycle and foot trail, laid out along the abandoned right-of-way of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. However, the trail has now been extended several kilometers northwest, past the Fremont neighborhood towards Ballard.

Because it is built on a former industrial site, the soil and groundwater on the site was contaminated. The 1971 Master Plan called for "cleaning and greening" the site through bio-phyto-remediation. Although the presence of organic pollutants had been substantially reduced by the mid 1980s the US Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology required additional measures including removing and capping wastes, and air sparging in the Southeast portion of the site to attempt to remove benzene that was a theoretical source of pollutants reaching Lake Union via ground water. There are no known areas of surface soil contamination remaining on the site today, although tar occasionally still oozes from some locations within the site and is isolated and removed.

Despite its somewhat isolated location, the park has been the site of numerous political rallies. Among these was a seven-month continuous vigil under the name PeaceWorks Park, in opposition to the Gulf War. The vigil began at a peace concert in August 1990 and continued until after the end of the shooting war. Among the people who participated in the vigil at one point or another were former congressman and future governor Mike Lowry, then-city-councilperson Sue Donaldson, sixties icon Timothy Leary, and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

Gas Works Park has been a setting for films, such as Singles and 10 Things I Hate About You. It has been featured twice on the travel-based television reality show The Amazing Race--once as the finish line for Season 3 and another time as the starting line for Season 10.

A few interesting points in this article.  First note that the Seattle Gassification Plant (which is truly massive btw) operated from 1906 to 1956 or 50 years.   By contrast, we have established a maximum operation time for our much smaller plant to have been 22 years.

Second, the Seattle Gassification Plant only closed in 1956, and yet according to the article by 1985 most of the property had already cycled out the pollutants. This is a period of 30 years.   As an additional contrast, we have alread established a time period of 113 years since the Jacksonville Gassification Plant was operational, possibly longer.

Third, the apparent pollutant one worries about with the gassification process is the release of benzenes as a related process from decompozing pollutants.

I havent seen any discussion of these benzenes in our environmental reports.

Am I missing something in the benzene conversation?

[thelakelander]

Interesting read.  By the way, although the gas works appeared to have closed around 1896, the 1907 directory has the company listed as the Citizens Gas Company (lights were dropped), specializing in gas stoves.  Their office at this time, was located at 18 E Forysth Street.  Sanborn maps also show a much larger gas plant near Beaver & Church in operation at this time.

[stephendare]

By the way, in other threads I have suggested phytoremediation as a safe way to combat the pollution in this park system.  It is far safer, and far far cheaper than the caveman methods we are presently using.

I was turned onto phytoremediation in Indiana at the Garfield sewage purification project sponsored by Garfield the Cat's creator, Jim Davis.

Here is a link that discusses the basic ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoremediation

Phytoremediation describes the treatment of environmental problems (bioremediation) through the use of plants.

The word's etymology comes from the Greek φυτο (phyto) = plant, and Latin « remedium » = restoring balance, or remediating. Phytoremediation consists in depolluting contaminated soils, water or air with plants able to contain, degrade or eliminate metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, crude oil and its derivatives, and various other contaminants, from the mediums that contain them.

It is clean, efficient, inexpensive and non-environmentally disruptive, as opposed to processes that require excavation of soil. The definitive textbook on phytoremediation was published in 2003 with contributed, peer reviewed articles from all major research groups involved in phytoremediation research (Phytoremediation: Transformation and Control of Contaminants, edited by Steven C. McCutcheon and Jerald L. Schnoor).

[thelakelander]

A few interesting points in this article.  First note that the Seattle Gassification Plant (which is truly massive btw) operated from 1906 to 1956 or 50 years.   By contrast, we have established a maximum operation time for our much smaller plant to have been 22 years.

Second, the Seattle Gassification Plant only closed in 1956, and yet according to the article by 1985 most of the property had already cycled out the pollutants. This is a period of 30 years.   As an additional contrast, we have alread established a time period of 113 years since the Jacksonville Gassification Plant was operational, possibly longer.

Third, the apparent pollutant one worries about with the gassification process is the release of benzenes as a related process from decompozing pollutants.

I havent seen any discussion of these benzenes in our environmental reports.

I'd be just as concerned about the other uses that took place on that site before the hotel was build there and the sites surrounding the hotel.  The gas works was one of many "dirty" industries during a time when the environment was not a real concern.  If something (gas, paint, car oil, human waste, whatever) has contaminated the ground in the general area, there's a good chance that contamination is not confined to one particular block.

[stephendare]

Interesting read.  By the way, although the gas works appeared to have closed around 1896, the 1907 directory has the company listed as the Citizens Gas Company (lights were dropped), specializing in gas stoves.  Their office at this time, was located at 18 E Forysth Street.  Sanborn maps also show a much larger gas plant near Beaver & Church in operation at this time.

Thanks Lake, I really think this 'problem' has a lot simpler solutions than declaring war on all the landowners, and then waiting on the 'guv'ment' to cough 10 million dollars to dig everything up, taking up another 15 years of foot dragging and bullshittery.

Its just going to need some calm assessment of reality, some creative positive solutions and then creative positive implementations.

By way of examply, here is a blurb on Davis's phytoremedial project as covered by The New York Times a few years ago.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E6D81339F931A25753C1A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

A poetic alternative is the "living machine" concept pioneered by John Todd, a Massachusetts biologist and an advocate of living more lightly on the land.

At Corkscrew Swamp, a National Audubon Society sanctuary near Naples, Fla., visitors can experience a living machine. To get to the bathroom, they walk through an aluminum screened enclosure into what seems to be a garden, a space with plastic tanks and lined trenches brimming with native marsh plants and species. These natural decomposers -- what Jan Beyea, an Audubon senior scientist, calls "nature's wonderful garbage men" -- purify the waste water, 90 percent of which is then recycled for yet another flush.

The E.P.A., which has financed four living-machine demonstration projects across the country, awaits results of an independent study to determine whether their performance is "sustainable over the years," said Robert Bastian, a senior environmental scientist with the E.P.A.

But the living machine already has its passionate adherents, including the cartoonist Jim Davis of "Garfield the Cat" fame, who has installed a Solar Aquatic system, a type of living machine, in a large greenhouse in Indiana on the property of his studio, Paws Inc. It is operated by a full-time horticulturist, Russ Vernon, who describes his job as "taking care of Garfield's litter box."

His system, designed by Ecological Engineering Associates of Marion, Mass., uses photosynthesis to speed the purification process by holding artificial ponds and marshes in translucent solar tanks. The constant flow keeps show-quality orchids blooming.

Because the technology is still considered experimental, Mr. Davis ran the risk of being shut down by the state if clean water requirements were not met. But so far, he said, "it's performed like a champion."

He added: "The only thing that's stopping the growth of this kind of operation is tradi tional thinking."

[stephendare]

Phytoremediation describes the treatment of environmental problems (bioremediation) through the use of plants.

The word's etymology comes from the Greek φυτο (phyto) = plant, and Latin « remedium » = restoring balance, or remediating. Phytoremediation consists in depolluting contaminated soils, water or air with plants able to contain, degrade or eliminate metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, crude oil and its derivatives, and various other contaminants, from the mediums that contain them.

It is clean, efficient, inexpensive and non-environmentally disruptive, as opposed to processes that require excavation of soil. The definitive textbook on phytoremediation was published in 2003 with contributed, peer reviewed articles from all major research groups involved in phytoremediation research (Phytoremediation: Transformation and Control of Contaminants, edited by Steven C. McCutcheon and Jerald L. Schnoor).

With the relatively low levels of ash and contaminants left in Hogans Creek, it could be cleaned up in less than 8 years while at the same time becoming a thing of beauty at approximately 1/10,000 th of the cost of traditional methods.

Of course, that would require a little more cerebrum and a lot less scrotum on the part of the Springfield side of the equation, and a whole lot more Sapiens than merely Erectus on the part of the city.

[stephendare]

I'd be just as concerned about the other uses that took place on that site before the hotel was build there and the sites surrounding the hotel.  The gas works was one of many "dirty" industries during a time when the environment was not a real concern.  If something (gas, paint, car oil, human waste, whatever) has contaminated the ground in the general area, there's a good chance that contamination is not confined to one particular block.

true but given the history, it is at this point the least likely to be the most significantly contributing property.

Actually considering that remediation has already taken place, this property has the potential of being the least contaminated of all of them.

FYI, because of the poisonous nature of the gassification plants, it was the first industry to have national environmental regulations created for it.  They date back to the 1880s.

[thelakelander]

Thanks Lake, I really think this 'problem' has a lot simpler solutions than declaring war on all the landowners, and then waiting on the 'guv'ment' to cough 10 million dollars to dig everything up, taking up another 15 years of foot dragging and bullshittery.

I don't think we'll get any where blaming downtown advocates that want to see the park and creek restored.  Without them and their passion, the park system would still be as poorly maintained as it was five years ago.  The difference in what it looks like today and what it was in 2003 is night and day.  Also, as I understand it, a good portion of money set aside to restore the creek, ended up being shifted to Iraq.

As for the Park View, if the site has a clean bill of health, then there's little anyone can do to hold up or deny redevelopment if a developer is serious about investing in it.  Quite frankly, there's no reason for someone not to be in favor of improving the site.