Saturday’s ceremony to mark the completion of Gainesville’s Depot Park will end a more than quarter-century journey to transform a polluted, largely abandoned industrial tract from a downtown blight to a city treasure.
It began in 1990 when Gainesville Regional Utilities spent $13 million to buy the assets, land and liabilities of the closed-down Gainesville Gas Company coal gasification plant off South Main Street and Depot Avenue. The city became responsible for cleaning up the coal tar and other contamination from the site, without knowing the extent of the pollution.