Smelterville

Little wonder then that the lanky senator returned to his roots on a rainy day in September 1999 to announce his candidacy for the 2000 presidential race. Standing outside the Crystal City High School gymnasium, Bradley began his campaign speech by touching on a topic that's now sparked a lightning rod of discord in his hometown.

"Less than a mile from where I'm standing, near the banks of the Mississippi River, there once stood the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company," Bradley told the throngs of well-wishers who braved the rain showers to see him. "It was there for 100 years. In its heyday, it employed 4,000 people and turned out thousands of tons of glass a year. It seemed that just about everybody in town worked for what we called PPG. We didn't grow corn or wheat here in Crystal City — we made glass."

Bradley ended his trip down memory lane saying, "Today I want to be as clear as that glass about who I am and why I am running for president of the United States."

These days all that remains of the PPG glass factory, which provided Crystal City its namesake, is an empty, 250-acre field just east of the city's historic downtown. Heavily polluted from nearly a century of industrial use, the property looks not unlike the present-day Superfund site of Times Beach, Missouri. Trees and tall grass grow inside a chainlink fence encircling the property. Over the years the site has become something of a nature reserve, attracting hawks, rabbits and other wildlife.

When Jack Ginnever and his girlfriend Sheryl Boss bought their home — a 1920s mansion that once served as Crystal City's hospital — they were under the impression the PPG land that bordered their yard was too contaminated for development. "We heard talk of making it a park," recalls Ginnever, a soft-spoken IT professional who moved to Crystal City in 2004. "Worst-case scenario was that they'd build a prison on the property, but we didn't think that was likely."

Then last August word came that Crystal City officials were in closed-door negotiations to develop a $1 billion iron-ore smelter on the PPG land. The word "smelter" alone was enough to alarm many of the city's 4,200 residents. Four miles north of town is the city of Herculaneum, home to the notorious lead smelter that belongs to the Doe Run Company. In 2002 the state required Doe Run to purchase 160 homes in Herculaneum after health officials found that 56 percent of the children living within a quarter mile of the smelter had elevated blood lead levels.

Crystal City residents feared the same results, and soon news of the Crystal City smelter dominated headlines in the Jefferson County weeklies, the Leader and the News Democrat Journal. The town's city council meetings that usually play host to a half-dozen onlookers now drew hundreds of angry, sign-toting citizens demanding that the project be abandoned. By September 5 the protests grew so intense that Mayor Tom Schilly was forced to schedule a public meeting in the high school auditorium.

So it was that some 400 people crammed into the school where eight years earlier Bill Bradley announced his presidential intentions. But if the mayor thought the meeting would allay resident's fears, he was quickly disappointed, as audience members began to pepper him with worrisome questions about environmental hazards. "What will the long-term effects be from pollution?" inquired one resident. "What about noise?" asked another. "Will the plant operate 24 hours a day?"

A confidentiality agreement inked between the city and the smelter's St. Louis developer, Jim Kennedy, prohibited the mayor from providing any specific details concerning pollution. And Kennedy, who was also in attendance that night, deferred most all environmental inquiries to Leanne Tippet Mosby, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Mosby's attempts to downplay health concerns — by stressing that iron-ore smelting produces fewer toxins than lead — fell flat after she admitted knowing nothing about the size or scope of the proposed smelter.

"I don't care what type of lipstick you put on this pig, this is still a dirty, nasty thing," grouses Ginnever, who, like many in attendance, left that September meeting with more questions than answers. Chief among them was whether their hometown hero, Bill Bradley, may also be involved in the project.

Shortly after dropping out of the presidential contest, Bradley sold the family home on Taylor Avenue in downtown Crystal City. But the former New York Knicks star still owns a 350-acre tract of land adjacent to the PPG property. E-mails obtained through Sunshine Law requests indicate Bradley is considering the sale of his property, known as Hug's Farm, to Jim Kennedy. The addition of Bradley's land could more than double the size of the proposed smelter.

Bradley, who now works for the New York financial firm Allen & Company, did not respond to numerous interview requests for this story. Nor has he made his intentions known to the hundreds of Crystal City residents who fear their favorite son is quite literally selling out his old hometown. The former senator is just one of the several larger-than-life characters tied directly — or indirectly — to the smelter. The list includes real estate speculators, a Senior Olympics volleyball player, the "Communist Chinese" and even the famous consumer advocate and Hollywood inspiration Erin Brockovich.

"I keep waiting for Michael Moore to show up with his cameras," says Crystal City resident Terry Coleman. "This is Roger & Me in Crystal City. It's the ultimate underdog story."

The frenzy surrounding the Crystal City smelter may never have transpired without the aid of Tom Kerr. A California transplant, Kerr wears Hawaiian-print shirts 365 days a year, making him something of a dead ringer for the Beach Boys' golden-oldies crooner, Mike Love.

Kerr also turns plenty of heads on the road, zipping about Crystal City's winding roads in his improbably small Mercedes-Benz Smart Car. The 53-year-old entrepreneur imports the tiny automobiles from Germany and sells them out of the old Rexall Drug warehouse he owns in north St. Louis. The building also serves as headquarters for Kerr's Fiesta Corporation, which, in addition to selling Smart Cars and exotic steam showers, provides warehousing services.

Last spring Kerr further diversified his business interests when he acquired the old sand mines immediately south of Crystal City. The mines once provided PPG with the silica necessary to make glass, but they've sat unused for decades. Kerr reasons that the constant 62-degree temperature inside the caves makes for a perfect warehouse space. More than that, though, Kerr sees the mines as an international destination and dreams of converting the caves into an enormous underground playground.

"We're talking an Olympic-caliber facility," says Kerr, who grew up playing volleyball on the beaches of San Diego and now travels the nation playing the sport in the Senior Olympics. "Volleyball, badminton, hockey. Everything will all be under one roof."

On a recent winter day, Kerr and his business associate, Jim Duncan, stand outside the mouth of the mines sharing a twelve-pack of Michelob Light. The two have recently installed spotlights on the floor of the caves, and the 400-watt bulbs illuminate a deep antechamber supported by columns of sand and rock as thick as redwood trees. "This is where we're going to have our extreme sports," says Kerr. "Rock-climbing, paintball, motocross."

At 5.5 million square feet, the mine is roughly five times the size of the Saint Louis Galleria. But PPG hit an aquifer during its mining, and much of the caves now lie submerged in water. Far from seeing this as an obstacle, the ever-optimistic Kerr boasts that the water is almost clean enough to drink. "It's been naturally filtered by sand," he notes. "We could bottle it or sell it for irrigation."

Back outside in the blinding light of afternoon, Kerr points out where he'd locate the hotels, a convention center and outdoor amphitheater. Kerr's even gone so far as to draw up architectural sketches of the complex. The only thing keeping his dreams from becoming reality, he says, is the smelter. "You can't have a world-class athletic complex located next door to a smelter," complains Kerr. "It just doesn't make sense."

Kerr says he offered PPG $5.4 million for the site of its old glass factory last summer. When the company failed to respond, Kerr says he offered the same deal to the city. It was only then that Kerr learned Crystal City officials were working behind the scenes to sell the PPG property to Jim Kennedy's Wings Enterprises. A little more digging revealed that Beijing-based Minmetals (a company that operates under the control of the Chinese government) was providing Kennedy a $300 million deed of trust to finance the smelter.