The Frankford Arsenal once housed Philly’s narcotics unit. The site gave officers brain cancer, lawsuits say.

Joseph Cooney joined the Philadelphia Police Department’s narcotics unit in 1998. For eight years, the officer began and finished each workday at the unit’s headquarters on the site of the old Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia’s Bridesburg section, where munitions were manufactured and tested from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.

Cooney, 53, said he would joke with his colleagues that “we’ll all be glowing in the dark someday” because of the materials left behind in the ground and the chemical plants across the Frankford Creek. In 2024, that joke became a dark reality for Cooney when he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive and incurable brain cancer.

In a lawsuit, filed along with lawsuits by the families of two narcotics officers who died of the disease, Cooney links his cancer to radioactive and toxic materials that had not been properly remediated when the munitions factory shut down and the site was converted to a business park.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Common Pleas Court, accuses the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, developer Mark Hankin, and Hankin’s businesses of having known about risks of exposure but failing to warn those working in the location or properly remediate the harm.

“This type of cancer, at the end of the day, it’s a death sentence,” Cooney said. “When you go to work every day, you don’t expect to be dealing with this.”

The Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development declined to comment. Hankin did not respond to requests for comment.

The Frankford Arsenal opened in 1816 as a weapons storage and repair shop for the U.S. Army, and in 1849 became the country’s largest developer and manufacturer of small arms and artillery shells. The arsenal’s campus grew over the years, including a massive expansion during World War II. By the end of the war, workers fondly referred to it as “the street that beat Hitler."

Each war throughout the century-plus of the arsenal’s existence brought its own challenges, and the complex between Bridge Street, Tacony Street, and the Frankford Creek adapted to support the nation’s military needs.

The arsenal closed in 1977 and the authority for industrial development, an agency with a mayor-appointed board, became the campus’ steward. Hankin, a Montgomery County developer, bought the campus in the 1980s and transformed it into a business park, which included the narcotics unit headquarters from the early 1990s until 2015.

As soon as the arsenal closed, decontamination needs were discussed, newspaper articles from the time show. An official report found the existence of dangerous materials in buildings in 1981, before the property was converted to civilian use, the lawsuits say.

Throughout the 2000s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in a series of reports, flagged concerns over dangers in the old arsenal’s ground. A 2016 report found elevated concentrations of lead and potentially cancer-causing substances in six areas that posed “unacceptable risk or potential concerns to future human receptors.”

One of the areas of concern noted in the report sits atop building 202 — the narcotics unit’s former home.

Cooney has been hearing over the past decades about colleagues from his narcotics unit days who have gotten sick.

Michael Deal, who spent 37 years on the police force and joined the narcotics unit in 1994, was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2018 and died the next year at age 64. Then, in 2023, Andrew Schafer, a 20-year veteran who worked at narcotics from 2002 to 2015, also was diagnosed with the brain cancer. He died in March at age 51.

The families of Deal and Schafer also filed lawsuits similar to Cooney’s.

Cooney heard through the grapevine about other cases. And then he was diagnosed.

“Everyone sat down, started talking,” Cooney said. “The only common denominator was everybody worked in the same building.”

Adding to their concern were the adjacent chemical plants, Cooney said.

Fifty-four employees of the Rohm & Haas chemical plant, right across the Frankford Creek from the arsenal, died of lung cancer in the 1960s and early ’70s, the Philadelphia Daily News reported in 1981.

The current suits allege that the contaminants in the arsenal ground were not properly cleaned up, and that those working at the site were not warned despite a series of reports.

“The remediation was not done to the extent that it eliminated the risk,“ said William Davis, the attorney who filed the suits. ”Up until now we have no evidence that there was any warning to any tenants.”

Cooney still works as a police officer, with a desk job supporting the city’s SWAT team. He has lost much of his independence to the disease, which can be slowed but not cured. He can no longer drive or coach youth sports, and relies on a cane to walk.

“It’s tough now,” Cooney said. “You feel like you’re getting robbed.”

The officer is concerned about who will take care of his wife and their seven children once he is gone, and Cooney is especially worried for the health of one of his daughters — a biology teacher at Franklin Towne Charter High School, which sits on the arsenal’s old site.