If you’re a collector of Cold War memorabilia, the US General Services Administration has a hot item for you: the Youngstown Test Annex, 98.7 acres at the corner of Balmer and Porter Center Roads in Niagara County. An online auction for the parcel began on July 12, with a minimum opening bid of $100,000.

The Youngstown Test Annex was originally part of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a 7,500-acre site purchased by the US Army in 1942 for a TNT plant, which ceased operations after a year. Gradually the property was transfered to other government agencies—which put the land to a variety of uses, some everyday and some quite mysterious—or sold piecemeal to private citizens, businesses and municipalities.

The parcel being auctioned, which lies south of Balmer Road, is surrounded on three sides by Chemical Waste Management, the last landfill in the Northeast that still accepts toxic chemical waste. More or less due south of the site is the Niagara Falls Storage Site, where the Department of Energy monitors a massive amount of radioactive wastes created by the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission, among other sources. Southeast is Modern Landfill, another waste facility. The auction property itself was, like all former Nike missile bases, on the list of Superfund sites, although it has since been delisted, whether appropriately or not. (Love Canal has been delisted as a Superfund site, too, although 20,000 tons of toxic waste remain there.)

The Lewiston Porter Schools are nearby, as well, also on former LOOW property. A few years back a University at Buffalo study recommended that the schools be shut immediately because of the environmental risks posed by the school property and its neighbors. (That recommendation has been ignored; in fact an expansion of the school is on the drawing board.)

The US Army acquired the site in 1955, according to the GSA, and turned it into a Nike missile launch site. The US Air Force acquired the property in 1966 for use as a Tropospheric Scatter Radar Link, part of the early warning network that hypothetically would detect Soviet missiles or bombers on their way to North American soil. The site has been closed since 1990.

The property, according to the GSA’s auction page, “is improved with six missile silos, and buildings of various stages of deterioration.” The reactangular-shaped “silo lids” have been welded shut, according to the GSA. Aerial photography suggests that one of them has been filled entirely with concrete—why, God only knows. (A GSA spokesman offered to send a copy of the site’s environmental review, not received as of press time. Neil Nolf, spokesman for the nearby Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base, said he knew nothing about the property auction.) A little less than half the acreage contains wetlands.

As of press time, no bids had yet been received on the property. A spokesman for the GSA said that’s not unusual—he said people interested in online auctions of properties like this generally spend a few weeks doing due diligence. Calls to Modern Landfill and CWM, who would seem to be likely bidders on the property, were not returned. George Spira, formerly public liaison for Chemical Waste Management and now chair of the Town of Porter Planning Board—whose zoning will apply to the site—said he hadn’t heard about the sale, which surprised him. Usually, he said, the federal government first offered such parcels to other branches of the federal government, then to the state, then to the lesser municipalities. This did not seem to have been the case here.

Asked if he suspected that CWM—which has faced serious opposition to its efforts to expand operations—might be interested in the property, Spira said he had no idea. But he suggested that purchasing the property would not effect an automatic, de facto expansion for CWM; the company would still need permission from Albany to use the new property for waste disposal.

The last individual to buy a significant chunk of land in the area was the late John Syms, a Tonawanda-based businessman whose company had contracts with the US military. Syms bought a hundred or so acres of US Air Force property on the former LOOW in 1969, in order to provide his company with more space. The site included a number of abandoned industrial buildings, which Syms rented out to other light manufacturers. In 1972 the New York State Department of Health told Syms that his property was horribly contaminated and that all operations on site had to be shut down. Syms spent the last three decades of his life in court trying to force the federal government to clean up the property it sold him. He died in 2001 with the matter unresolved.

For more info: http://www.auctionrp.com/auctions2/default.cfm?action=itemInfo&id=766. The property is sold as is.

Bid high, bid often.