Looking at the ugly pit in the heart of downtown Tacoma, you might not know of its famous past, ignominious present or uncertain future.
Until 1961, the most noteworthy episode in the 1400 block of Pacific Avenue happened the morning of June 12, 1945. Lottie Brustad, a cook at Victor’s, a diner in the bus depot there, cracked open an egg to find four yolks.
A chicken farmer from Auburn who just arrived by bus pronounced the four-yolker a rare achievement worthy of a museum display.
Unfortunately, since Lottie already partially fried the eggs, the yolks never made it to the Smithsonian. Instead they went on display at the depot for a few days – until warm weather made them too smelly to keep around.
After the North Coast Transportation Co. abandoned its central bus terminal, Pete Sauro in 1961 opened Sauro’s Cleanarama – the drive-through dry cleaner to the stars.
Performers in town for Tacoma Dome appearances often sent their costumes for cleaning at Sauro’s. Janet Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, Prince, Reba McEntire, U2.
Little did any of the customers know then that the waste sludge and old dry cleaning fluid dropped two stories into a dry well where the liquid would seep through the soil and into the groundwater.
After Sauro’s closed in 2000 and the building got torn down, a preliminary evaluation of the pit pointed to Sauro’s apparent use of a dry well, said Marv Coleman, site manager and inspector for the State Department of Ecology’s toxics cleanup program.
“Perchlorethylene. Dry cleaning fluid,” Coleman said. “It sticks around in the groundwater for a long time, and it doesn’t break down very readily. … Then as it does break down, it has ‘daughter products’ that are carcinogenic. It’s pretty toxic, and the sites are a challenge to address.
“I wouldn’t say it was common for businesses to dispose of the stuff in a sump or dry well. But a lot of them did,” Coleman said.
Sauro enrolled the property in the Ecology Department’s voluntary cleanup program in March 2001. The voluntary enrollment means the state takes a hands-off role until after an owner cleans up a property. Then the DOE evaluates the results.
After Sauro passed away in 2002, however, the cleanup stopped.
By this February, the department informed Sauro’s estate that two factors – the lack of voluntary progress and the complexity of the pollution – meant Ecology would oversee a more formal, legal cleanup remedy.
The DOE and attorneys representing Sauro’s estate plan to meet this month and, if all goes well, agree on a clean-up strategy.
Best case, Coleman said, the active cleanup could occur by next summer, which would allow for the sale or redevelopment of the property. However, monitoring wells and groundwater pumps might have to operate in and around the property indefinitely.
Zoom in on a satellite image of the site using Google Earth and you can see a cluster of barrels in the center. Look at it from the sidewalk and more barrels, marked “non-hazardous waste,” have appeared.
Those barrels contain soils and borings from additional evaluation of the site conducted this fall.
Mario Parisio, attorney for Sauro’s estate, declined to speak in detail on the record about the property.
“The estate’s goal right now is to comply and work cooperatively with the state of Washington to address the problems,” Parisio said.
Meanwhile, he said, Sauro’s heirs have “absolutely no plan or commitment by anybody to do anything” with the property right now.
Yet there it sits – a pit and an eyesore, albeit a potentially valuable one.
On two sides, German billionaire Erivan Haub owns property. Next door, developer Michael Bartlett of Oakland, Calif., owns the former Schoenfeld’s Furniture building that now houses offices for DaVita, the kidney dialysis company.
“This is one of the few parcels downtown that doesn’t have anything on it,” Coleman said. “We hope to get them to get rid of the stuff as soon as we can” to make the property available for redevelopment.
That day will warrant at least as much celebration as the discovery of a four-yolk egg.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
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