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ST. LOUIS — Andrew Crowe looks around the south side and puts a positive spin on the abandoned industrial sites, warehouses and manufacturing plants that used to provide thousands of jobs in city neighborhoods.

Where some see decline — along South Broadway, on both sides of Gravois Avenue, in the Patch, Carondelet and Bevo neighborhoods — Crowe sees hope.

“We’ve got all the bones,� he says.

He’s talking about the structure for what he calls the Crowe, a former instructor at Ranken Technical College, believes the country’s economic future is tied to its ability to bring back manufacturing jobs.

Who will fill those jobs? People who look like him, Crowe says.

Crowe, 35, grew up on the city’s north side, near the intersections of Union Boulevard and Maffitt Avenue in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood. His family was poor and sometimes got evicted. They moved around a lot. Crowe attended Ladue High School as part of the city’s desegregation program. He excelled in sports and landed a college scholarship. But the streets caught up with him and, after college graduation, he spent 18 months in prison on gun and drug charges.

One night during that stint, he was on the phone with his young son. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were watching “Monday Night Footballâ€� together. The recorded voice that accompanies a phone call from prison alerted father and son that their call would soon run out of time. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ wouldn’t get to watch the end of the game together. Crowe’s son cried.

It was an inflection point. Crowe realized he had to break away from the street life. “If I didn’t do something different, then my son was going to be in there watching ‘Monday Night Football’ with me,� he says.

After prison, he got a job at a manufacturing company — a supplier to Boeing — and a light bulb went off. Crowe had skills. He had an aptitude for building things.

“The job made me feel like I was part of the red, white and blue for the first time,� he says.

He would go on to work in several advanced manufacturing jobs, and then teach the skills necessary to get those jobs. But he often found that he was the only Black man in a sea of older, white males.

He’s back in St. Louis now after building as an advocate for diversifying America’s manufacturing workforce. And he wants his home city to be ground zero for the renaissance. He wants people who look like him, and have his lived experience, to realize there is a future in jobs they may have never considered, through the digital revolution overtaking the manufacturing world.

“I truly believe St. Louis can be a case study,� Crowe says. “We have a population that needs jobs.�

He believes getting young people to work — offering them jobs and hope — is the path to reducing the crime that has plagued the city since before he was born.

He does his work these days in a coworking space in the Carondelet School, which was built in 1871 and . The site, he says, tells the story of St. Louis — its growth, its decline and its potential to rebuild from the “bones� that still exist.

From a room that still has built-in chalkboards (preserved because of the building’s historic status), Crowe uses digital chalkboards — , LinkedIn and — to evangelize about rebuilding America’s manufacturing base in cities that used to hum with the sounds of machines.

He’s trying to secure funding to open a training center and accelerate the teaching of advanced manufacturing skills and financial literacy to young St. Louisans. Crowe thinks there ought to be plenty of federal funding available from President Biden’s infrastructure legislation, and he’s looking for warehouse space and support from business and civic leaders to launch his plan.

Crowe has met with the business booster group Greater St. Louis, the folks planning the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center, Southwestern Illinois College and others working on similar goals. But he has yet to push the right buttons to get his project off and running.

It’s an old St. Louis story. There are plenty of folks who talk a good game about jump-starting manufacturing jobs by recruiting from underserved populations. But getting across the finish line requires cooperation across civic and geographic boundaries in a way that isn’t always an easy task in this area, particularly when the guy making the pitch has a record.

Still, Crowe’s optimism and energy are infectious. He is committed to finding young men and women who need a reason to turn away from the streets and toward a future they never envisioned, transforming a broken city into something greater than its parts. He wants St. Louis to be known as the city of second chances.

“We are so much better than our national reputation,� Crowe says. “This is a beautiful city. There is no other time to do this than right now.�