Mowing Over One Town’s Tainted Past

Memories haunt Missouri’s latest state park, just as surely as wild turkeys stalk the shaded trails.

Memories. And fear.

For the park perches on the rubble of Times Beach.

That name might not mean much now. The town of Times Beach hasn’t existed for nearly 15 years. But back in the early 1980s, Times Beach was notorious.

It was the dioxin town. The poison town.

Back then, just a mention of Times Beach could conjure fear. It was not quite Three Mile Island. But it was the worst toxic waste calamity the nation had ever seen. A whole town, soiled by chemical muck. A whole town so lethal it had to be scrubbed clean off the map.

Now, you can picnic on what’s left of Times Beach.

There’s a huge green hill, lush with grass, that the park staff calls the “town mound.” It’s the smashed, bulldozed remnants of mobile homes and the Easy Living Laundromat, Christmas ornaments and bedroom sets, swings and stereos, the bar at the Western Lounge and the pews of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church.

It’s all of Times Beach, in fact, compacted into landfill, covered with soil, sprinkled with grass seed. All ready, now, for a picnic.

State and federal officials insist the town mound--indeed, the entire 409-acre park--is safe.

There is no more dioxin here.

But it used to run in the streets. Literally. Mixed with motor oil, dioxin was for years sprayed on Times Beach’s unpaved roads to control dust. Kids used to play in the purple-tinged goo. They loved to skid their bikes through it. They slipped in it. They fell in it. They tracked it in on living room rugs.

Then someone wised up. Dioxin soon became known as the “‘doomsday chemical.” One of the most lethal brews man had ever concocted. Now, scientists believe it’s not as bad as first thought, and no illnesses among Times Beach residents have been traced conclusively to dioxin. But back then, it was thought to be so dangerous that the Environmental Protection Agency took samples of Times Beach soil and raised an instant alarm. The town was evacuated just after Christmas 1982. People left everything behind.

The government spent $32 million buying out homeowners and businesses. The contaminated roads were scraped up and incinerated.

And then Times Beach was no more. The city unincorporated in 1985. The name disappeared off maps and signs. And the triangle of land along the Meramac River, about 25 miles southwest of St. Louis, was cleaned up and turned into Missouri’s newest state park, named for the stretch of old Route 66 it straddles.

Afire with the sunset hues of fall, the park opened last month packed with bikers and hikers--4,000 of them on the first day alone, apparently not spooked by the land’s tainted past. They saw deer and blue herons, cattails and wildflowers, even a mini-museum of Route 66 memorabilia. There are picnic tables at the park, seven smooth miles of trails, plans for a boat launch to open next fall.

“A rebirth,” Diane Warhover, park superintendent, called it.

But a rebirth tinged with fear.

Folks who lived near Times Beach and fought the incinerator say they’re not so sure the park is clean. The official OK doesn’t reassure them.

“I call it a relaxing green space for the brave of heart,” one neighbor, Mary Derrick, said.

Another, Ann Dollarhide, added bitterly: “They can change the name from Times Beach to Route 66 State Park, but it’s still going to be a reminder of all that’s happened. I don’t have any desire to ever go there.”

Others, more willing to trust the cleanup (“None of the animals glow in the dark,” neighbor Carol Thompson joked), hail the park as a near-miracle, the best thing that could have happened to a contaminated town that even in its heyday leaned toward the scruffy side of suburbia.

The park is the latest, and perhaps the last, chapter in a most unusual history.

Founded in 1925 by the St. Louis Times newspaper--a six-month subscription plus $67.50 bought you a plot of land--Times Beach started out as a summer resort, a party town with 13 bars, no churches and lots of girls in bathing suits lounging by the Meramac River. It evolved, over decades, into a working-class town that held community pig roasts by the river and boasted an everyone-knows-everyone ease. It also flooded regularly, mud creeping as high as second-floor bedrooms in a bad year.

At the time of the buyout, more than 2,000 people called Times Beach home.

Hundreds of them returned before the park opened to the public last month to walk along their former streets, not yet overgrown and still identifiable. Many applauded the park. But it reminded them of the neighbors, the homes, the possessions they lost.

“I saw this chemical ruin a whole community,” said Marilyn Leistner, who lived in Times Beach for 26 years and was the town’s last mayor. “I would rather see it a park than desolate. But I’d rather see it a town than a park.”