May 3--A CURIOUS THING WILL HAPPEN -- or, more accurately, not happen -- next month in St. Louis. For the first time in decades, the metro area won't have a single assembly plant turning out cars or trucks.

For nearly half a century, the area prided itself on being the biggest center of auto manufacturing outside Detroit. Then Ford closed in 2006, and Chrysler shut one of its two Fenton plants last October. The remaining Chrysler factory, which makes the Dodge Ram pickup, has been idled by the company's bankruptcy filing.

The pickup plant may reopen for a short time if Chrysler's Chapter 11 reorganization is successful, but it's scheduled to close permanently next year. That will leave General Motors in Wentzville as the area's only auto-assembly plant.

GM, though, is scheduled for a seven-week shutdown beginning June 6. For much of the summer, the number of vehicles coming off St. Louis assembly lines will be exactly the same as the number of workers building them: zero.

Zero is a striking number in a region that has been building autos more or less continuously since St. Louis Motor Car Co. began operations in 1898. Ford arrived in 1914, GM in 1920 and Chrysler in 1959, and the Big Three employed 29,000 St. Louisans by the late 1970s.

When the Chrysler shutdown is complete, we'll be down to fewer than 2,000 auto workers, all at GM. The area has been hurt by auto-industry slumps before, but the latest job losses feel permanent.

"At some point, we are going to start buying cars again," says Russell Signorino, a vice president at the United Way and a longtime student of the area labor market. "The unfortunate thing is that when the auto industry starts to crank up production again, it's not going to be in St. Louis."

Jack Strauss, professor of economics at St. Louis University, says that as a rule of thumb, one assembly job supports two other jobs. So in losing 1,000 Chrysler jobs, we could also lose 2,000 jobs at parts suppliers and at businesses patronized by the auto workers.

Several parts plants here have closed since Chrysler shut down its minivan plant last fall. They include Lear Seating in Earth City, Findlay Industries in Chesterfield and TRW in Fenton, according to an industrial real-estate report from Colliers Turley Martin Tucker.

The region's political leaders are talking bravely about persuading Chrysler to reopen its Fenton plants, or perhaps finding another automaker to reopen them.

The unpleasant truth, though, is that the more parts suppliers we lose, the less attractive we are as an auto-assembly location.

Patrick McKeehan, executive director of the Leadership Council Southwestern Illinois, led efforts to try to save Ford's Hazelwood plant a few years ago. Even then, it was clear that the Big Three were retrenching and that most of their production capacity would be within a couple hundred miles of Detroit.

"At this point, St. Louis is down to one plant, pretty far out on the edge of the Detroit system," McKeehan said Friday. "That may limit the region's ability to compete in this industry in the future."

So, while it's fine to pursue any possibility of getting the Chrysler plants reopened, we need to look at other potential uses for the property. We also need programs that will train the auto workers for other jobs.

Hope was a great campaign slogan, but it's not a strategy for the auto industry or for St. Louis.

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