General Electric’s former factory, sandwiched between Lawrence Street and North Arlington Avenue — and straddling the border of Bloomfield and East Orange — is a testament to Bloomfield’s former industrial heyday.

What was once a thriving factory that employed thousands of workers during the first half of the 20th century has had mixed and eclectic industrial uses for the last 20 years.

But the large and mostly-unused buildings on the site could soon give way to the newest wave of residential development. The 767-unit proposed development on the border of the two municipalities, called “Parkway Lofts,” would include converting the six-story main building into a complex of condominium lofts, then tearing down the rest of the buildings on the 21-acre site, and then constructing in their place mid-rise apartment buildings, townhouses and other residential units spread over the rest of the property.

But the site, formerly a General Electric factory where electronics were manufactured, has shown itself to be in need of environmental remediation throughout its history, even up to the present time. Some of those problems, it appears, are still waiting to be remediated.

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Because of its history, the site falls under Industrial Sites Recovery Act, or ISRA, status. There have been several incidents and tests that have indicated that pollution problems on Lawrence Street persist, even decades after the closing of the factory.

In July of 1999, there were leaks detected in several underground storage tanks on the site. Three 25,000 gallon fuel oil tanks were replaced and a fourth was abandoned on-site after highly-elevated levels of petroleum hydrocarbons were detected; there were also elevated levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH’s, a group of contaminants that are known to cause cancer and to affect reproduction in laboratory mice. Another oil spill also occurred from a transformer malfunction three years later, in 2002.

However, there have been other, more serious spills of volatile organic compounds found at the site. On March 31, 2004, an unknown liquid containing at least one kind of carbon tetrachloride was released into the ground; those family of substances are also proven carcinogens, and can cause damage to the liver, kidneys, or central nervous system.

The Nutley Haz-Mat squad responded to a smoke and chemical combustion situation in August of 2001, when an oil tank began smoking after nearby clay had been added to the petroleum compounds there.

In 2004, Stericycle acquired a reading of radioactive material in its waste, which was later determined to be from an doctor’s office that used X-rays.

But some of the lingering, long-term contamination has been blamed on the runoff from other, adjacent industrial sites. In December of 2001, chlorinated and volatile organic compounds were detected in the ground water monitoring wells on the General Electric site. However, the property owners subsequently claimed that the contamination was mostly due to ground water flow from the Westinghouse site to the northeast — a site known to have uranium and tricholoethylene, or TCE, contamination among other substances, and which has natural seepage toward Lawrence Street due to underground strata of bedrock and its naturally higher elevation. However, the samples from General Electric proved to show fundamentally different results from those of Westinghouse, including the elevated levels of extra chemicals including variations of 1,1 -dicholorethene, or DCE, 1,1 - dicholoethane, known as DCA, 1,1,1 - tricholoethane, or TCA, and tetrachloroethylene, or PCE. All are in the same family of chemicals as TCE, known for their long-term health hazards. Most of these compounds derive from TCE, a commonly-found industrial solvent on many brownfields and a majority of EPA Superfund sites nationwide.