The last oil tank is down at the old ExxonMobil tank farm in South Everett.

That matters because this is not some symbolic art project. It is a 105-acre industrial site that sat there as a relic of Everett’s tank-farm past, and it only gets cleaned up if somebody with money is willing to do the ugly, expensive part first.

According to the Everett Independent, the site is owned by The Davis Companies and Global Partners LP, which acquired it in 2023. The tank that just came down was no small leftover piece. It measured 190 feet in diameter and once held up to 16 million gallons of home heating oil.

Mayor Robert Van Campen was on site for the demolition. He called it “an incredible process to watch unfold” and said, “It’s the last tank to come down, and it represents the broader transformation we’re going to see on this 105-acre site right here in South Everett.”

That is the part worth paying attention to. Not the ribbon-cutting language. The actual sequence.

First, somebody buys a contaminated industrial parcel. Then they spend years remediating it. Then they remove the infrastructure from its former use. Then, if city government does not lose its mind halfway through, vertical development can start.

Michael Cantalupa, chief development officer for The Davis Companies, said exactly that: “This final step in the demolition process clears the way to begin vertical development and realize the potential of the Everett Docklands.”

Again, plain English: the site had to be cleared before anything else could happen.

Cantalupa said Davis envisions “a resilient, walkable, innovative neighborhood” with “open space, housing, and retail,” plus “high tech manufacturing and cutting-edge commercial space.” Fine. Every developer has a vision statement. What counts is that the cleanup is real, the tank is gone, and the land is moving closer to usable condition.

The Independent also noted that the remediation is the largest in Everett’s history. That is the bigger story here. Everett has spent decades living with the leftovers of other people’s industrial economy. If this parcel gets remediated and rebuilt into housing, commercial space, and public waterfront access, that is not cosmetic. That is a direct change in what South Everett can be.

And yes, it is worth remembering what has been hanging over this project. The site has been dragged through political noise over hypothetical data centers that Davis never proposed. While activists and some public officials were busy generating urgency around uses that were not actually on the table, the actual work on the ground kept going: demolition, cleanup, preparation.

That is usually how Everett politics works. The loudest people are often arguing about abstractions while the real stakes are sitting in the dirt, attached to permits, timelines, and money.

Now the dirt is a little cleaner, the last tank is scrap, and the window for getting this site to productive use is more real than it was a week ago.

For a city with a lot of blighted land and not a lot of patience left, that is a milestone worth noticing.