SuperFund visionary: Denver developer Jon Cook plans to build high-density housing on the remediated grounds of the former Shattuck Chemical Co., one of 20 EPA Superfund sites in Colorado.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [PLANET-PROFIT REPORT]

There was once a toxic concrete monolith on the southern fringes of Denver proper, the leftovers of the Shattuck Chemical Co. It was the very definition of the worst kind of brownfield--an environmentally compromised piece of real estate.

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A century ago during the medical radium fad, Shattuck refined the radioactive metal here, leaving an environmental legacy that outlived the company. In the early 1990s, a record of decision and a consent decree allowed for the mixing of the radioactive soils with cement, thus the big monolith that restricted future land use but contained the radioactivity.

Only it wasn't too good at the latter. The monolith failed in the midst of its semi-residential, semi-industrial neighborhood, and the mess was named one of the most polluted sites in urban America, if not the most polluted. After the monolith was shown to be faulty, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided to take a different approach at Shattuck, then part of the Denver Radium Superfund site.

For the better part of a decade, laborers in protective suits worked three shifts tearing the monolith asunder with jackhammers under a movable mining structure. The radioactive rubble was then loaded into railcars and whisked northwest to Mountain Home, Idaho.

Nearly $60 million worth of remediation later, the monolith is gone. The oversized shed that sheathed the monolith for close to a decade came down in 2006. Today the Shattuck site is a vacant lot covered in knee-high grass, the light rail rising between the site and Santa Fe Drive and the Platte River.

But there is a vision. And the visionary is Jon Cook, a self-described cowboy real-estate agent and car dealer who has quietly acquired 15 acres--including the Shattuck site's six acre s--over the course of the last decade.

Now owner of Colorado Commercial Capital, Cook got his start in commercial real estate by buying a South Broadway car lot in the early 1970s and has risen to become a real estate titan in the South Denver-Englewood area. But the Shattuck site is his biggest gamble yet.

Cook would like to build an apartment tower to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) specifications, but the zoning could limit him to four stories if efforts to get the area rezoned to high-density don't pan out. He aims to break ground in 2011, after the city completes a major makeover of the South Broadway streetscape.

"We have an assemblage in that area, in total about 15 acres," says Cook, who says he's been buying properties in the Shattuck area since 1998. "We are internally calling it the Lumberyards development area. We bought the Kroonenberg Lumberyards from the Kroonenberg brothers, Art and Clarence. Their father started in the neighborhood in the early 1900s with lumber and the home delivery of coal from a railroad spur there."

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Cook says his daughter and business partner, Dominique, got him interested in sustainable development on compromised properties. He's behind a LEED-rated multi-use building at 2700 South Broadway in Engle-wood slated for ribbon-cutting in February.

"That was a former gas station, where the tanks had to be removed and the land remediated," Cook says. "Now we're building a gold LEED-rated building. We have a great restaurant going in on the ground level."

Cook sees his Broadway project as a small example of what he envisions at the Lumberyards. "We really are dedicated to this. It's going to be LEED-certified, an unbelievable change from the monolith. We plan on developing it ourselves, and it is a long-term family hold."

City officials have been working with consultants and focus groups to formulate a redevelopment plan for the nearby Evans light rail station.

"We are not seeing the density we would like to have seen," Cook says. "Look at European...