When Brian Kelly finished high school in 1973, he thought he'd take a year off to work before starting university.

He got a job in the Westinghouse factory at Longwood and Aberdeen, and went to work on an assembly line, putting parts in refrigerators and ranges.

"I only did it for a year, but an awful lot of people in Hamilton had always done that," Kelly said. "It gave me an appreciation for how working men and working women made their living, and I've never forgotten that."

The factory was sold to Camco a few years later, and when it closed in 2004, its empty buildings became sorry symbols of Hamilton's troubled manufacturing economy.

McMaster University bought the complex the next year and began making plans for a new research park to replace it.

The university decided to keep the red-brick administration building and remake it as the park's headquarters: a place for academic, private and government partners to work on ideas that could help build a new economy.

Yesterday, Kelly, now 54 and a government relations adviser at McMaster, felt his optimism swell anew as he stood in that building for the official opening of the first building at McMaster Innovation Park, following an extensive $19.2-million renovation.

The building at 175 Longwood Rd. S. is already more than 70 per cent full, and is expected to reach full capacity by next year.

Yesterday, sunlight shone through a new skylight in the roof and down through four newly fenestrated concrete floors to the podium where politicians and university leaders praised the transformation of the old factory complex into a new symbol: that of Hamilton's economic revival.

"You would look over this landscape and see nothing but despair and broken dreams," MPP Ted McMeekin said. "And now on this extraordinary day, this site has been resurrected and transformed."

The building's airy new centre provides the official name of the building, revealed yesterday: the Atrium @ MIP.

All around the perimeter, outside conference rooms, labs and offices, work from 30 local artists adds depth, brightness and whimsy, grafting the community to its new neighbour in the kind of show that will become an ongoing feature at the building.

Next door, work is well under way on the federal government's CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory, a $60-million project slated to open next year.

The university plans to build about 14 buildings at the park during the next 15 years.