Times Beach — The Story of an American Town

The former Times Beach

It is difficult to describe how uncomfortable summer can be in St. Louis. Hot and humid doesn’t really capture it. To understand, you have to be outside at 10:30 on a July night, when the temperature hasn’t yet dipped below 90.

As a result, St. Louisans have been determined in their search for relief, and this was especially true before home air-conditioning. That probably accounts for the success of a 1925 newspaper promotion: Buy a subscription, get a waterfront vacation lot.

The St. Louis Times owned land about 25 miles from St. Louis on a bend of the Meramec River. A gravel bar (think sand bar, but rougher) bordered the river, and the newspaper marketing department called it a beach. They laid out a town and named it after the paper: Times Beach.

The Times promoted the new resort hard, using headlines such as these:

The Sweltering Heat and Discomfort of the City
Are Unknown at
TIMES BEACH

Delay Means Disappointment
Opportunity is Knocking at Your Door at Beautiful
TIMES BEACH

YOU MUST ACT NOW — OR NEVER
The THIRD and LAST Section of Lots Now THROWN OPEN
at the
ST. LOUIS TIMES New Summer Resort

Promotional copy in the newspaper struck similar notes:

The Times invites you to enjoy its own summerland,
where dull care, heat and discomfort are unknown.

Never in the history of St. Louis have its residents
grasped so eagerly the chance to own a summer
place of their own in Nature’s own playground.

The lots were 20 by 100 feet, and of course they weren’t free. The terms looked pretty attractive, though — ten dollars down and $2.50 a month, total $67.50. For that, you got the land, membership in a community center, use of bathhouses, and a “mile of beach.” You could get there from St. Louis by train, bus, or car, although travel was by back roads until Highway 66 was completed.

Times Beach was hot, damp, and buggy, but people bought and built. The promotion was so popular the newspaper expanded it twice. Even so, the more savvy built their houses on stilts as a hedge against flooding.

Men who worked in St. Louis spent summer weekends at Times Beach and then returned to the city for the business week, leaving their families on the river. Almost everyone went back to St. Louis in the winter.

Eventually, the Great Depression and a post-World War II housing shortage turned the resort into a year-round residence, and by the 1960s it was a town, not a collection of vacation houses. But prosperity eluded Times Beach, and the fatal symptom of its economic condition was this: The town didn’t pave the majority of its streets. There were miles of dirt roads.

A dirt road gets dusty when it’s dry. It develops ruts when it’s wet. One way to control these problems is to spray the road with oil. In 1971, the city fathers retained a contractor who used waste oil for the job, and, unknown to town residents, that oil was laced with dioxins.

At the time, dioxins were regarded as one of the most toxic chemicals ever synthesized by man. Once absorbed into the body, they can remain in fat tissue for as many as eleven years, affecting “the immune system, the developing nervous system, the endocrine system, and reproductive functions,” according to the World Health Organization. Dioxins cause cancer.

Oblivious to the threat embedded in its streets, Times Beach joined the National Flood Insurance Program in 1977, which was a prudent move for a town on a flood plain inside the curve of a river. Unfortunately, coverage ceased in 1980.

Then came the winter of 1982, an apocalypse of water and chemicals for Times Beach. On December fifth and sixth, flood waters from the Meramec River washed over the town, reaching the tops of garage doors and even higher in some areas. Houses not on stilts filled with water. The river rose so fast that some residents left their cars behind as they fled.

The waters had barely receded, and residents were still coming to terms with the devastation and their lack of flood insurance, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the presence of dioxins in the town. People were warned not to return to their homes, because it was unsafe to live where they had lived for years.

Strange medical conditions suddenly made terrible sense, and lawsuits proliferated. The town was declared a Superfund site, becoming part of the federal government’s “program to clean up the nation’s uncontrolled hazardous waste sites,” as the EPA put it. By April of 1992, every building in what had been Times Beach was gone.

In 1996 and 1997, the dioxin-contaminated soil was scraped from the ground and burned in a huge, factory-scale incinerator built where the town had once been. Eventually, the site was proclaimed to be clean — clean enough, in fact, for a state park to be established there.

You can visit Times Beach today, if you wish. Travel west from St. Louis on U.S. Highway 50 to Missouri’s Route 66 State Park. Cross the old bridge over the Meramec and go down the hill into the former town. When you do, you’ll see scenes like the one at the top of this page.

The lots have returned to woods and other flood plain vegetation. The streets are disappearing. There are no buildings to wash away in the next flood. As for the dirt on which you stand, the government says it’s safe.

This is a piece from www.route-50.com, where you can find stories about people, places, and things along the 3,073 miles of U.S. Highway 50.

The newspaper headlines and quotes are from pages of the St. Louis Times displayed at the Route 66 State Park Visitor Center.

The photo at the top of the page is of the land where the town of Times Beach once stood, copyright Scott A. Seely.