AKRON, Ohio -- The apartments on Akron's Shoreline Drive are a sprawling example of mid-century architecture, with wide windows and balconies adorning every apartment and an inviting forest bordering one side.

Underfoot, one of the most nefarious toxic remains from mid-century America's industrial legacy still lingers.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, next door to several large apartment buildings and middle class subdivision, Summit Equipment and Supplies recycled used power transformers.

These plain-looking metal cylinders - the type you might see mounted on the side of a telephone pole - were filled with polychlorinated biphenyls, often called PCBs, a lethal poison that can damage the human thyroid and slowly kill off nerve and brain cells.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that, in the 1970s, Summit Equipment was melting the transformers inside a furnace at the southwest Akron site, often burning the PCB oils as fuel.

As a result, noxious PCB laden fumes drifted into the air, above homes. Heavy metals, including cancer-causing hexavalent chromium, and dioxin settled in soil. When the EPA began testing and removing soil from the area in the 1980s, it found test ammunition and unexploded smoke grenades buried nearby.

Starting in 1987, crews began removing toxic drums and material from the dump site, but unexploded grenades and ammunition rounds made cleanup difficult.

From 1991 through 2000, over 68,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed from the grassy land adjacent to the Castle Apartments, along with 2,000 tons of scrapped car engines, 300 capacitors and 1,300 PCB-laced transformer carcasses.

The agency removed 160 drums containing residue from the furnaces that burned the noxious oil.

Today the site is a fenced-off reminder of the dark side of Akron's industrial heyday. Groundwater is sampled regularly to monitor heavy metals and toxins, while signs warn residents in neighboring apartments of the toxic waste that once spewed from a furnace, yards away.