Contiminated city site, once home to Ogilvie Foods, to be cleaned

If the space between North Pleasant Street and California Avenue was a playground, it would have been one of the more popular play places in the city Tuesday night. A group of children walked along a dirt mound close to the north tree line while others were picking through the nearby brush.

The vacant, trash-strewn land known to neighbors as the former Ogilvie Foods site is going to be cleaned, four years after testing confirmed about 256 tons of soil at the four-acre site is laced with petroleum.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced April 20 it is awarding the city $200,000 for the project. That means no more broken glass, discarded tires or tainted soil.

City Planning and Community Development Coordinator Kenneth A. Mix said Friday he is still waiting to hear back from the feds to determine what the grant entails. He suspects, although he can’t confirm until the paperwork arrives, that the city will solicit bids for contractors to work on the site. A schedule for work, he said, also is fuzzy for the time being.

The city will be expected to contribute $40,000 as a match for the grant funds.

Ogilvie Foods closed its doors in 1995. The city razed the abandoned plant in 2003, and then took ownership of the property, and the responsibility to clean up it, in October 2009.

This is the third major cleanup project the city has undertaken since the mid-1980s. The city spent $1 million, of mostly state funds, to clean the former Abe Cooper Surplus Co. site on Factory Street. A portion of that land was purchased and a billboard constructed on it. The city has also built a small park with access to the river on the north side of the property.

In 2008, an engineer located underground barrels of petroleum on the former site of a Black Clawson Co. property at Sewall's Island. The city took ownership of that property and could have it clean by the end of this year.

While Mayor Jeffrey E. Graham has said allowing a billboard at the Abe Cooper site was a mistake, the city is still determining what it will do with Sewall’s Island once it’s granted a clean bill of health.

The city will have time to determine the fate of the Ogilvie Site as well, although in-fill housing has been discussed.

At the time the city razed the former whey processing plant, neighbors described a sour milk smell that hung over the neighborhood.

In a June 2003 article, a Times reporter described the building this way:

“Before becoming an abandoned nuisance to nearby residents, the factory was an active annoyance. Neighbors said the plant was loud and had a smell that made them feel sick. The factory dried and processed whey, which is a byproduct of cheese making and was shipped to the plant in liquid form. Large dryers converted the liquid into powder that is used in a variety of food products, such as candy bars and diet foods.”

Beauty or blight, apparently, is in the eye of the beholder.