Sep. 26--Nearly 10,000 people once worked at the sprawling ruins known to some as the former A.O. Smith industrial site, to others as the deathbed of Tower Automotive.

Now it is down to a single worker, Rich Wendling, who learned recently that his final shift comes in November, following the City of Milwaukee's decision to buy the mothballed property and create a modern industrial park.

When Wendling, 59, walks out of the guard shack for good, so will an encyclopedic body of first-hand knowledge about the 82-acre site that the city waged a bitter legal battle to acquire. The city has budgeted $18.3 million for demolition, environmental remediation and asbestos removal, chores that Wendling knows will be massive and expensive: The site, he says, holds miles of asbestos-laden ductwork, and soil contaminated with decades of oil discharges.

"The city has no idea what they are getting," Wendling says.

The gray-bearded electrician began working at the site in 1969, at a time when A.O. Smith designed and built the undercarriages for nearly every American-made passenger car. His dad, brother and uncle worked there, too. So did his grandfather from Germany, who began there in 1896, just as Arthur Oliver Smith was building the first of his many cathedral-sized factories on the grounds.

The city says its structural engineers have not yet made a complete inspection of the site, although it has spoken to demolition and asbestos experts. Nor has it determined which buildings it will keep.

The site holds one building with undisputed architectural merit: the seven-story Art Deco research-and-development tower that once earned the admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright.

From the street, the 1930-vintage building at 3533 N. 27th St. seems intact, with its glass curtain walls that are sliced into zig-zag bays. In its heyday, the hundreds of engineers in the jazz-age tower were known for innovation in welding, metals and materials. But the interior is in shambles -- ransacked, vandalized, repeatedly flooded, and packed with asbestos.

It would cost $15 million just to strip the asbestos from the building, according to the lowest bid that Wendling received earlier this year. On a tour, Wendling points to chalky white powder that spills out of a wall: "Everything in here is asbestos. That's how they built things then."

A separate crew said it would cost $500,000 to repair the leaky roof -- and that bid is 2 years old, predating the flooding that destroyed much of the interior. Peeling paint accumulates like snowdrifts. Parquet flooring on every level has buckled into an obstacle course.