Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value

He's in fine eat-the-rich fettle. "To hell with the executives. The workers are the ones who built this community."

Hendricks's history in Beloit is more complicated than one might think, given his love of restoring things and the town's obvious need for restoration. ABC's rise roughly coincides with the decline of this racially mixed city of 35,000. Once a thriving industrial center, Beloit began to leak manufacturing jobs in the late 1980s. A couple of nasty crimes tarnished its image; physical and social infrastructures frayed.

Despite the city's troubles, Hendricks's early forays into local development met with some hostility. His real estate buys in minority neighborhoods--at one point in the '70s he and Diane owned about 100 houses in such areas--earned him the epithet slumlord. Those charges have dissipated, but innuendo occasionally comes back like reflux. At a recent United Way event, Hendricks says, a woman "came up to me and shook her finger in my face and said, 'I know how you made your money. You're not such a hotshot.' But the people around us immediately attacked her. They said, 'How can you say that? Don't you know what he's done for us?'"

Hendricks still attracts ire today--not surprising; he's an unelected private citizen with strong opinions and the resources to get his way. Some people take angry issue with his projects--most notably a plan to move the police station, library, and other city services from the business district to a largely vacant mall he owns half a mile away. A number of business owners, in particular, worry that the exodus will sap vitality from downtown. "It's a very small sliver," says William Barth, editor in chief of the Beloit Daily News. "But you do hear the occasional comment, 'Why don't we just rename it Hendricksville?'"

Hendricks's reputation started to change in 1993, when he pulled off his first local coup de théâtre. Like almost everything else related to Beloit's revival, it involved the waterfront. Leaders here have long viewed the Rock River as key to luring businesses and people; in 1988 they formed a civic development organization called Beloit 2000 (now Beloit 2020) and cleared dilapidated bars, bowling alleys, and gas stations from the river's banks. In their stead, the group built a park replete with running paths, playgrounds, and paddleboats. The new waterfront is the first thing visitors see upon entering town. Green and vibrant, it practically begs you to stop and take a stroll.

But across the road from the river, a monstrosity loomed--the rotting remains of Fairbanks Morse, a maker of diesel engines that at its peak employed more than 5,000 people. Over 50 years, the company's Beloit operations had dwindled until two-thirds of the 120-acre campus sat vacant--a brooding eyesore of colossal proportions. Hendricks bought the property. And rather than demolish it, he transformed the buildings into the castle-on-a-hill that is now ABC's headquarters.

Ask almost anyone in town what established Ken Hendricks in Beloit, and they cite the resurrection of Fairbanks Morse. That act also introduced the city to his doctrine of preservation and unearthing buried value, which has guided much of Beloit's recovery. Gary Grabowski, executive director of the Beloit Foundation, a local philanthropic organization, remembers driving past the Fairbanks Morse and thinking, This has got to go. "What makes Ken Hendricks Ken Hendricks," Grabowski says, "is that he stood on the roof and said, 'My God, look at that view! Why would you destroy this?'"

Beloit Ironworks, the old Beloit Corp. property rehabilitated and renamed by Hendricks, isn't just a boon to workers present. It is also a memorial to workers past. The pale-brick and metal buildings are swathed in massive murals, mostly black-and-white photos of real workers and scenes from the plant's glory days blown up and reproduced on vinyl. An old man in a tatty sweater stares wistfully into the distance; beside him are a cocky-looking fellow in a cloth cap and other faces captured generations ago. Panoramic scenes from the old plant's interior cover entire walls. At night, when lights shine down through colored glass panels near the roof, those walls seem shorn away. Viewing the building from a parking lot across the river, I imagine I am gazing at an operational factory floor, albeit one with eerily immobile workers.

Interrupted every few minutes by the cascading trill of his cell phone, Hendricks is giving me the grand overview. "The photos are people who actually worked here--not the owners, not the executives. To hell with the executives," says Hendricks, who is in fine eat-the-rich fettle. "The workers are the ones who built this community, paid taxes, built the roads and schools. I take people on tours of the building and they get tears in their eyes. It reconnects them, gives them their history."

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