The North Shore Traces A Toxic Legacy

Port Richmond — Once, 170 years ago, there was a factory on Staten Island, and the factory made lead. Some of the lead got into the ground. In the 1920s the factory caught fire and burned down. The lead stayed.

60 years later, people from the Environmental Protection Agency came to see about cleaning the lead up, but they couldn't find it; the property owner had given them the wrong address. Not too wrong, but just enough: It referred to Shore Road, which the street outside the factory used to be called decades earlier, before it became Richmond Terrace. The lead stayed.

This was in 1981. The factory site is now a dusty lot, and the lead is still there. But the EPA, which had missed it the first time, went back in 2008 and determined last year that it must go. A spokesman told City Limits that the agency hopes to take more soil samples this month, as soon as a sampling plan is complete.

The property–commonly known by the names of former owners, like Jewett White Lead and Sedutto's Ice Cream–has much in common with its industrial neighbors on the island's North Shore. Besides the shore's 60,000 residents, the 5-mile stretch of Staten Island facing the narrow Kill Van Kull is home to a checkerboard of toxic and contaminated sites, several of which have been polluted for decades without cleanup.
        
Even as debates about new industry on the shore continue – planned projects include a controversial cement terminal and a container port expansion that would pave over 18 acres of marshland –the toxic legacy of old industry remains, and while it's the focus of
renewed government attention, officials at the agencies involved say long and deliberate remediation processes are just getting started.

For residents, action cannot come soon enough; according to Census data, four of Staten Island's five poorest zip codes are on the North Shore. In some cases, all that separates industrial sites from residential areas is the width of Richmond Terrace. In others, the margin is even less.
        
"Everybody in this community is already at a disadvantage," said Beryl Thurman, executive director of the North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island. "The last thing they need to deal with is the disadvantage of being in an environment that's poisoning them."

In 2008, Thurman, who lives in the North Shore's Port Richmond neighborhood, used $10,000 in grant money from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to produce a booklet, sardonically titled "Staten Island's Gold Coast." It details the troubled environmental history of 21 different sites on the North Shore, ranging from the alarming (a Manhattan Project-era uranium spill) to the mundane (fumes from a bus depot).

The EPA took notice, and in November, it named the North Shore as one of 10 charter members in its Environmental Justice Showcase Communities program. The program targets communities with "multiple, disproportionate environmental health burdens" and "limits to effective participation in decisions" about environmental issues, according to the EPA's web site. It is not primarily focused on cleanup, but on broader tasks like education and community outreach. On Staten Island, the program's web site says, the agency aims to develop a community-based health strategy.

By federal government standards, the funding for the Showcase project is slim: $1 million, to be divided among the 10 named communities, which are spread across the country.