Once-toxic town wrestles with upscale makeover

RUSTON, Pierce County — From the outside, this building still looks like the modest, brick schoolhouse it was for decades.

It was here that the working-class children of Ruston scrawled math problems on chalkboards and gazed out the back windows to where most of their parents worked: a massive smelter that sucked copper from rubbly ore, churning out leftover slag and air — both tainted with lead and arsenic.

But now, walking in the front door of the old Ruston School is like stepping into a different world.

Up the stairs to the right, a new kitchen glints with polished granite countertops and a stainless-steel refrigerator. A bathtub fills with water that pours from the ceiling like a waterfall.

It's a sample unit of a condominium project under construction in the former school's back yard, with units starting at $700,000.

It's also a glimpse of the new Ruston.

For most of the past two decades, this tiny town of 745 people on the western edge of Tacoma lived in a time capsule, put there by its infamous designation as a federal Superfund cleanup site, a title reserved for the most polluted places in the country. Property values stagnated. Banks wouldn't give mortgages. Yards were scraped bare to remove tainted soil.

Now cleanup is nearly complete, and the former factory town has emerged from its suspended animation. While Ruston residents are eager to have the pollution cloud lifted, life after Superfund is creating its own anxiety.

Perched high on a hill with commanding views of Commencement Bay and Mount Rainier, the town is catching the attention of wealthy people who once only passed through on the way to nearby Point Defiance Park.

Some residents welcome the prospect of an upscale Ruston. But others see a threat to its factory-town roots. And those people are numerous enough that last November they helped vote out the town's mayor, who still dares to envision the town as the "Medina of Pierce County."

"I feel like I live in a very small town right next to a major city," said town Councilman Bob Everding, a retired college dean who moved to Ruston two years ago and was elected to the council in November as part of the slow-growth ticket.

"Whether that can be preserved or not, I'm not certain. But those of us who moved here for that reason would like to maintain that."

A surge in prices

Remodeled and fancy new homes have been springing up in Ruston since the late 1990s, but recently there has been a major surge. Houses now stand on what used to be the gardens of the homes next door. Some of the tiniest old homes are falling to the redevelopers' bulldozers. From 2003 to 2006, the median price of a Ruston home doubled, from $167,000 to $335,000.

The schoolhouse-turned-showroom puts an exclamation point on the new trend. It displays plans for a 60-unit luxury condominium, "The Commencement," complete with personal wine cellars and a rooftop spa.

The condo project sits on a bluff looking out across the 90 acres where the smelter once stood, a site that for decades shaped the character of this town and is now about to do it again.

Another developer, Mike Cohen, is negotiating to buy the smelter site from Asarco, which ran the factory until 1986. He talks of a project there that would dwarf The Commencement. The smelter-site project would include as many as 800 upscale condominium units and homes, along with restaurants and stores. Construction could start next year on five acres that have been declared clean enough for people to live on.

But The Commencement, displayed at the old school, has already become an emblem of the future for both those who hate it and those who like it.

For opponents, its size and opulence are a source of worry. Supporters see evidence of the town's revival, and a welcome infusion of money.

The town sold The Commencement developers 1 ¼ acres of land at the school, plus the land where the current town hall sits. Developers paid Ruston $4.25 million and promised to build a new fire station and put a new town hall in the renovated school.

Last fall's mayoral and town-council elections became a bitter referendum on The Commencement. Opponents won handily. The incumbent mayor, Kim Wheeler, who had orchestrated the land sale, was defeated, along with a council member who had voted for the deal.

"The people really weren't listened to well about what they wanted to have happen," said Everding. "A building that size in this community was so out of place."

Wheeler, out of office now, still predicts that the town is destined to become Pierce County's equivalent of Medina, the super-rich suburb on Lake Washington.

"You either get on board and control what's going to happen, or you get overrun," said Wheeler.

Working class no more

Inside the schoolhouse, Michelle Sanford, one of the developers of The Commencement, seems unfazed by the controversy.

She walks through the showroom showing off the new Viking stove she installed herself the night before.

"Turn on the tub," Sanford calls to an assistant, before rounding the corner to reveal the gush of water pouring from a faucet in the ceiling.

The project is aimed at wealthy, aging Tacoma residents. Prices range from $700,000 to $1.5 million for a unit. Twenty-one units have already sold, including the most expensive ones.

"This here is not going to be working class any more," said Sanford.

The promotional literature pays a brief homage to the town's history, with a black-and-white photo of the sprawling factory, where rocky ore from the mines was superheated to separate the pure copper.

The word "Superfund" is not present.

A paycheck, a landmark

Mary Joyce, who raised six children here and has served on the town council since 1970, can recall when Ruston lived on smelter time.

When the factory changed shifts, it was like watching mice race in and out of the vast complex. The smelter's paychecks lined the pockets of shoppers at the grocery store run by her parents, Croatian immigrants.

Ruston was founded in 1906 on a square mile of land, named for William Ross Rust, the smelter owner who championed the town's creation. The smelter's 563-foot smokestack was so prominent that ship captains entering Commencement Bay navigated by it.

Until it was demolished in 1993, that smokestack also put out a plume thought to have sent arsenic and lead as far away as Issaquah. At the same time, the contaminated slag, the once-molten rubble left over after the copper was pulled from the ore, was dumped into Commencement Bay, where it cooled like rocks heaved from a volcano.

By the time the factory closed, the ground around it was as much as one-third arsenic and 1 percent lead.

Even so, the Superfund cleanup was viewed with skepticism, even hostility, by many people in Ruston.

As cleanup began in the late 1980s, some accused the Environmental Protection Agency of exaggerating the risks of the pollution. The EPA says lead exposure can cause learning impairment in children, while arsenic exposure can cause cancer.

Joyce, now a 76-year-old grandmother, still scoffs at the concern. Her garden walls are built out of dark-gray chunks of the smelter slag. Her children grew up healthy, and the shortest, her daughter, is more than 6 feet tall, she points out.

"Maybe a little bit of arsenic did her good," Joyce quipped.

The point of the cleanup was to make the smelter land clean enough to use again. Ruston residents have known for years that there would be development. The issue is how it would look.

For Beth Torbet, it can't come too soon.

Since 1985 she and her husband, Don, have run Don's Ruston Market, a convenience store and restaurant, from a squat concrete building that crests the hill separating the smelter site from the main part of town.

"If there's 800 units, there's got to be someone who wants to have a sandwich," Beth Torbet said.

But the prospect of such a huge development gives others pause.

"We're a small town. If we get 2,000 people in town, it's not going to be a small town anymore. I like the idea of a small town," said Joyce.

For sale soon

The first of the new residents on smelter land could be coming next year, if Cohen, the developer, gets his way.

Before he buys the land from Asarco, however, Cohen needs to reach a deal with the EPA over what part of the remaining cleanup he will do, and what parts will be left to Asarco or taxpayers.

Underwater sediment along the waterfront and in a nearby marina remain contaminated, as does a peninsula built from slag.

Even so, Cohen thinks he could start building houses on "Stack Hill," where the smokestack stood, next year.

Then Cohen hopes to turn his attention to new condominiums, to be built on a flat expanse where Ruston's factory workers once spent their days, in the rumble and dirt and stink of the smelter.

"We hope there will certainly be opportunities to live out here for under $500,000," Cohen said. Then he paused.

"That sounds sort of crazy, 'As cheap as $490,000.' "

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com