Ohio River Park Superfund Site

As you pass by the northern tip of Neville Island today, sunlight reflects off the white dome of the Robert Morris University Island Sports Center, where Pittsburgh’s athletes go to golf and play sports year-round. But the 32 northernmost acres of the island also go by another name: the Ohio River Park Superfund site. Have no fear—the Environmental Protection Agency placed the area on its National Priorities List in 1990 and monitored the cleanup of the site, declaring it safe in 1999. [1]

Industrial brownfields—sites contaminated by their past industrial use—became prevalent throughout Western Pennsylvania during the decades of deindustrialization that followed World War II. Deindustrialization came after 50 years of intense industrialization on Neville Island, which began in 1900 when American Steel and Wire bought 182 acres of former farmland on the southern tip of the island and built a blast furnace for steel production. By 1916, firms on the island were also producing pig iron, scrapping steel, refining oil and making concrete.

In 1929, Davison Coke and Iron bought the old American Steel and Wire blast furnace and built new coke ovens and a cement plant on the property, which generated a lot of industrial waste and pollution despite the company’s efforts to reduce and control it. Davison was reorganized as Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical (PC&C) in 1936, and in 1940 PC&C added the manufacture of chemical products to the coke, iron and concrete it was already producing on Neville Island. The passage of the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 and local pressure from Pittsburgh civic leaders to improve the region’s air quality led PC&C to begin trucking its industrial waste to the northern end of the island and burying it in trenches, instead of burning it or emptying it into the river.

After PC&C sold off its chemical operations, PC&C President Henry Hillman donated the property to Allegheny County in 1976 to be used for a park. When the county started construction, they discovered the toxic waste and determined the site was a public health hazard. After the intensive cleanup effort in the 1990s (paid for by The Hillman Company), the land could assume a new purpose: providing space for recreation and leisure to Pittsburghers of all ages. [2]

• [1] “Ohio River Park, Neville Island, PA Cleanup Activities,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, accessed June 11, 2020,.
• [2] Hugh Gorman, “Manufacturing Brownfields: The Case of Neville Island, Pennsylvania,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 3 (July 1997), 539–74.