The large mural inside the Florence Municipal Building depicts a pastoral Delaware River scene: a side-wheeler ferry boat crossing the river, a lady and gentleman in a rowboat, steepled churches and quaint houses overlooking the river from a low bluff.

TINA MARKOE/Courier-Post An overview of the old Roebling Steel Mill complex, now a superfund cleanup site.

At the very edge of the painting stands the stately red-bricked Roebling Steel Mill complex, smokestacks puffing plumes of smoke into a blue sky. It's a scene Mayor George Sampson would like to recapture, with the steel mill as the link between the town's past and its future.

He envisions the plant's many old buildings restored for commercial uses: retail shopping, offices, marina or even an industrial port.

If Sampson's vision is to come true, it will have to involve a partnership with private developers and federal, state and local officials an example of an arrangement many see as the best hope for finally redeveloping hundreds of former industrial sites along the river.

Officials have long recognized one of the keys to a more vibrant river will be to make it more visually appealing, to replace the rusting hulks and dilapidated brick buildings of abandoned industrial sites with parks, bike paths, restaurants and shops. To put housing where old factories once stood.

But making all this happen has been slow and frustrating. Hundreds of these properties from small chemical plants to sprawling steels mills such as Roebling line the river.

Few have been redeveloped, mostly because of developers' fears of being held accountable for past pollution … and bureaucratic red tape.

What's clear is new ways of thinking need to take hold if the riverfront is ever to be redeveloped on any significant scale.

State and federal officials are trying to spur private development interest of these properties … known as Brownfields by easing cleanup standards and providing developers with money to conduct cleanup investigations.

Sampson hopes changes in thinking and partnerships with private developers will finally result in the cleanup and redevelopment of the Roebling Steel Mill. He worked as a mill manager during its latter years, when it was owned by Colorado Fuel and Iron.

Roebling, a federal Superfund cleanup site, is a dramatic example of a Brownfields cleanup. Its sprawling grounds on the Delaware River are contaminated with heavy metals left over from smelting. Asbestos and hazardous waste taint its deteriorating buildings.

Houses may not be appropriate here, Sampson says. But in addition to commercial development, he hopes to see a museum to manufacturing at the long gate house where thousands of workers once clocked in daily. A park could be built just south of the factory along a scenic river bend where metals-tainted slag was dumped, he said.

The steel mill, built by industrialist Charles G. Roebling in the early 1900s, was a testament to New Jersey's 19th-century industrial might. At its height, the plant employed more than 10,000 people including immigrants from Poland, Russia, Hungary and other Eastern European nations.

Here, Roebling perfected the process of spinning individual steel rope into massive cables for construction of suspension bridges, including San Francisco's Golden Gate.
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