A little green at the old Navy yards

Who’d have thunk it? A part of the old Charleston Navy Base is getting notice for “green” development.

Natural Home Magazine picked a 340-acre slice of the old base, being developed as part of the Noisette Creek project, as one of the 10 best green-built neighborhoods in the country. The magazine cites things such as alternative energy sources, landscaping, and housing mix as positive points in its article.

When I read this, I had to read it again. Had to. I go back a few years with the old Navy yards.

The first time I’d driven onto the old base, in my old taxi, I was headed to the “south yards” to pick up one of the students at the Border Patrol Academy. I saw the rusted-out buildings, the holes in the road, and thought the place looked abandoned.

Abandoned, hell. At that time, about the best thing for the old Navy yard was perhaps a wrecking ball and a lot of Du Pont’s finest. The place looked, I thought, like a third-world country.

When I moved to Charleston in 1997, the base had already been shut down, and saw that North Charleston was heading into his worst time. Business had slowed down all around, what with those Navy folks being gone. A shopping mall near Montague Avenue was on its way out, being populated only with a Wards store. Decaying neighborhoods near the base went completely to hell.

As part of their orientation, Border Patrol trainees were warned not to go wandering around outside the gates; you never know what can happen. Yes, the neighborhood was that bad.

As the Charleston peninsula went through its redevelopment (and resulting gentrification) over the past decade, many of the displaced moved to North Chuck. Tourists made Charleston their destination; you never heard of anybody planning a romantic getaway to North Charleston. The area had been considered low-rent, a home to a zillion apartments and mobile homes. North Charleston has made some strides recently, but a few months ago was still ranked the seventh-most dangerous city in America.
The base itself has been in a state of flux. The Border Patrol moved in, the Border Patrol moved out. AmeriCorps moved in, AmeriCorps moved out. You can almost set this to music.

Now the south yard is home to the Homeland Security academy, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (or FLETC for short). A handful of shipping interests plied their trade at what is now known as the Veterans Terminal. Ships were repaired at the dry docks, now run by Detyens Shipyard. There’s a marina on the property, though boat owners regularly complain of their vessels getting covered in coal dust from the nearby Kinder-Morgan terminal. And after much initial resistance, plans are being made to build a container shipping terminal at the base’s south end.

And now, the Noisette Creek development is getting notice for greenness. The base has come a long way in 10 years. And this isn’t an easy achievement to pull off.

For all the military does to preserve our way of life, they are not known for their environmentally-friendly practices. There is a lot of dirty work that goes on at a military base, anything from storing fuel to handling chemicals and other substances that are, well, designed to kill folks on the other side of some imaginary line. That’s a fact of life. Sometimes this stuff is spilled, or forgotten, and the land underneath – and surrounding – the base takes a real beating.

Back in the late 1980s, when I was living in California, my area had two massive pieces of land that had been home to some really dirty tenants. One, in San Bernardino, was the old Norton Air Force Base, shut down in the first wave of base closures. The other, in Fontana, was the old Kaiser steel mill. Cleanup of the Kaiser site was estimated to be about $40 million, but the Norton site, as I recall, was far more contentious to rehabilitate. The steel mill site only had several mountains of slag, a PCB-rich area where they got rid of some old transformers, and some other relatively lightweight chemicals here and there. Norton, well, it was an air base; ‘nuff said.

Now, Norton (where one of my favorite celebrities, Gen. Chuck Yeager once commanded) is an international cargo airport. Kaiser? Well, after heavy talk of building an industrial park and a series of annexation wars, NASCAR came to town. The old steel mill is now the site of the California Speedway, a track that has brought much success to Jeff Gordon over the years.

But those are easier projecs. People don’t live at the cargo airport or race track.

Natural Home Magazine’s other favorites include a mixed-use project built on the old municipal airport site in Austin, Texas, 4,700 acres of reclaimed land at Denver’s old Stapleton Airport – the largest urban infill redevelopment project in the United States, and the new High Point project in Seattle, which replaces public housing. North Charleston is in some pretty fast company.

It’s nice to see North Charleston make this kind of Top Ten list for a change, and it’s especially nice to see a little green development at the old yards.