In The Stranger Suggests on Saturday, I got carried away and called the Olympic Sculpture Park a former Superfund site, which it isn’t. (Sorry, Chris.)

It’s a brownfield, which is defined by the EPA as follows:

Brownfields are abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.

Superfund sites are the worst of the worst—the country’s most contaminated hazardous waste sites.

While we’re on the subject of reuse, the Time art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo has a nice piece setting OSP in the context of other rescue sites.

So this isn’t just a park in the city. It’s a park with the city in it. Talk about the machine in the garden. … This is the direction that some of the most interesting new parks in the world are taking. In their search for usable parkland, densely developed cities in the U.S. and Europe are combing through their brownfields, disused and sometimes contaminated industrial sites. The Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance, is located on the former site of a fuel-storage and -transfer facility, which is why nearly all the original soil had to be dug out and carted away. And the City of New York is planning a huge and inventive new park atop Fresh Kills, the massive landfill—meaning garbage dump—on Staten Island where much of the debris from the Twin Towers was hauled after 9/11.