n September, a host of scientists, students and officials from all levels of government gathered to celebrate the opening of Gateway Park, a new life sciences and bioengineering center in Worcester, Mass. The center, part of a $75 million project headed by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and the Worcester Business Development Corporation (WBDC), is the first step in Worcester’s transformation from a sleepy post-industrial town to one of the new, emerging biotech hotspots.

At completion, Gateway Park will contain five life sciences buildings—totaling 500,000 square feet of adjustable lab space—and 1.7 acres of retail and residential developments.  

Formerly home to a variety of companies, including a grocery warehouse and a steel plant, most of Gateway Park sat vacant for years, languishing away in the city’s downtown district after Parker Metal Corp. moved out. Only a plating company had remained on the property, closing shop after being purchased by WPI and WBDC in 1999.

CDW Consultants, the company hired to handle remediation efforts, spent the following year assessing the property, researching its industrial past to prepare themselves for what they might find.

As it turns out, Gateway Park had been host to generations of various metal-producing factories. Washburn Metals begat American Steel, which begat a company that manufactured pewter for trophies. Researchers uncovered a bit of everything during their inspection of the soil and groundwater.

“The site’s history made the cleanup a very interesting process,” says Project Manager and Senior Environmental Engineer Kathleen Campbell, who has worked on the Gateway Park project since its inception.

“As it had been a big manufacturing plant, there were even rail spurs that went into the buildings. That in itself was a challenge.”

CDW and Gateway Park, LLC—the private entity formed by WPI and WBDC—decided that the best way to tackle Gateway Park would be to slice it into parcels, leaving the more difficult swaths of land to be cleaned up later. The plating company posed the toughest challenge because it was purchased without foreknowledge of what contamination was lying underneath. The team inevitably changed its game plan, reallocating resources to offset the exponential cost of removing the contamination, which would have been three times the initial estimated amount due to cyanide and petroleum contamination. The parcel is now a parking lot.

“The great thing is that there’s little chance of exposure, since it’s capped and eight feet underground,” says Campbell. “And it also limits who can dig there.”

Campbell says her group found a number of contaminants on the Gateway Park property, including lead, zinc, nickel alloy, arsenic—the latter, residue from rat poison used by the supermarket warehouse—and several underground storage tanks containing even more petroleum.

One of the high tech labs that is part of the new life sciences and bioengineering center at Gateway Park in Worcester, Mass.

Crews removed nearly 300 tons of soil and several thousand square feet of asbestos, while recycling 8,000 tons of wood that had previously been used as floorboards, beams and shingles. And keeping in step with environmentally friendly practices, old heating systems were replaced with new, energy-efficient ones.

Total remediation costs came in at just under $1 million, with cleanup of the plating company accounting for half of the bill. Now that the hard part is out of the way, Campbell says that the site should be completely finished in the next two years.

Meghan Lynch, WBDC’s project manager for Gateway Park, believes the project can serve as a lesson in cooperation. She credits federal, state and city officials with “going above and beyond” to make sure the project got off the ground.

One political advocate, Sen. Edward Augustus, had been working to renovate Gateway Park while still working as chief of staff for U.S. Rep. James McGovern.

“Sen. Augustus really championed this project,” says Lynch. “He worked to change brownfield funding to incorporate asbestos and lead cleanup, which helped other sites we’d been working on. Ultimately, we’ll be able to use it again at some point.”

And though residents weren’t very happy about the new influx of traffic, Lynch says that they, too, have been a great source of support for the project.

“People have gotten behind it because this is going to keep the property on the tax rolls,” says Lynch. “It’s a win-win.”

From California to South Carolina, research park construction has become an increasingly popular method of fostering economic growth, according to the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).

A recent organization report, “Growing the Nation’s Biotech Sector: State Bioscience Initiatives 2006,” highlights several states working to bring these new economic engines home. Since 2004, 20 bioscience parks and 15 multi-use research parks have been in various stages of development throughout the country. BFN