The Whole Foods Market in East Liberty handles 20,000 transactions every week, a level of action that still seems to startle Pittsburgh shoppers and officials who regularly cite the natural foods grocer as proof of that community's latent potential.

Yet, since the store's blockbuster 2002 opening, it's been quiet on the eastern front of the Centre Avenue site that the developer Mosites Co. promised would sprout more retail businesses.

Apparently, it wasn't exactly for lack of interest. Fast-food restaurants ready to install big drive-through windows called but the Mosites staff wasn't encouraging. The developers wanted instead the cool factor that came with Seattle outdoor retailer REI.

But when REI ultimately settled on the South Side, Mosites staff went another direction, telling city planning officials last week that they were in advanced negotiations to put in a Walgreens drugstore.

The response has been underwhelming. A drugstore? With a drive-through?

Yet the developers hold up the Walgreens' deal as good news for the East Liberty neighborhood for a couple of reasons. First, it lends credence to the claim that national retailers continue to be interested in the community struggling to reinvent itself.

Two, the Illinois company is interested enough to abandon a suburban prototype to be there, planning a store that would be on the first floor of a bigger building, with a drive-through that is supposed to be adapted to the site.

Whether retail development should be coming faster to East Liberty is hard to say, but there is clearly resistance -- both intrinsic and purposeful -- to a quick fix for a neighborhood that suffered under bulldozer-style urban renewal decades ago.

Though people have long sneered at the marks well-meaning urban designers inflicted when they ripped out buildings and created a sort of walled-off area encircled by the one-way Penn Circle boulevard, there's no guarantees that modern planners can't mess things up, too, said Rob Stephany, at East Liberty Development Inc. (ELDI), a nonprofit community development corporation.

Take, for example, plans to build a two-story Kmart discount department store just off Penn Circle West, on a site that was then used by the Pittsburgh Police Bureau's investigations branch. Officials were disappointed when that fell through in early 2002 under the weight of Kmart's financial woes.

Now, Stephany sees the loss as a blessing. He has come to believe the site, which does not adjoin the community's central Penn Avenue shopping corridor, might have siphoned off customers instead of delivering shopping traffic to smaller businesses.

A mixed-use development firm named Street-Works, out of White Plains, N.Y., was brought in to look at the area last year and has laid out a very different strategy for revving up East Liberty's retail potential. Instead of an isolated Kmart, the group's design calls for some kind of anchor, perhaps a large general merchandise store such as Target or Wal-Mart, on or near the intersection of Penn and Centre.

That kind of retailer would bring merchandise into the neighborhood that isn't easily available now, plus theoretically act rather like a mall anchor feeding customer traffic to nearby stores, both along Penn and Centre, the neighborhood's two main retail drags.

"We love that Centre Street corridor," said Andy Attinson, a Street-Works partner. With Whole Foods on one end and an urban version of a general merchant on the other, he said, smaller retailers would be eager to settle in between.

As for the site once destined for Kmart, East Liberty Development is negotiating for control of the property and plans to apply for a state grant to build townhouses and apartments. Where weed-strewn parking lots and the former detective building now stand, the group's designs call for as many as 85 units.

Such complicated rejiggering is not done overnight. "You've got a gazillion pieces to every puzzle," said Ernie Hogan, ELDI's director of residential housing development.

The long-term vision of a community centered on the tall spires of East Liberty Presbyterian Church with a mix of retail, offices and residential keeping things safe and lively through the day and night could take years to piece together.

And with a city strapped for cash limited in its ability to shove things along, the success of any redevelopment will likely rest on building consensus among disparate group as well as strategic public maneuvers that help set the stage for private investments.

For now, the big sparks seem to be coming off the Whole Foods launch, which has produced a parking crunch as well as proven that the area can draw bus riders and bicycle-bound shoppers.

"I know a number of tenants want to be around Whole Foods," said Attinson. Street-Works acted as a design consultant for East Liberty, not a developer, but the company drew interest when it displayed its proposals at the May national convention of the International Council of Shopping Centers in Las Vegas.

The most direct beneficiary of the grocer's spill-off would seem to be the five acres that the Mosites staff has labeled Eastside, stretching from Whole Foods to the Highland Avenue bridge.

Now home to some small parking lots, a Yellow Cab building and a recently shuttered car wash, the plan is to begin demolition within the next few months and to start construction before year-end. That assumes various planning approvals come through.

The first major tenant should be open next year, said Mark Minnerly, director of real estate development for Mosites. The tenant might not be Walgreens.

Minnerly said the company has a signed letter of intent from another mid-size national retailer and there's enough leasing action to spur hopes of building the site's remaining 80,000 square feet of planned retail space all at once instead of on a piecemeal basis.

Mosites' plans call for an "urban-scale" development that will tuck parking toward the back of the lot and put multi-level buildings at the edge of the property and Centre and Highland.

The pressure is on to create a seamless entrance across the Highland Bridge so that Shadyside types on the other side barely notice the separation between the two neighborhoods.

Already, the openings of two new restaurants just off Centre Avenue on South Highland is prompting reports of people walking over for a Saturday night dinner.

The Red Room Cafe and Lounge is serving up meals in the former Bell Atlantic building at the corner, while Abay, a new Ethiopian restaurant, has customers eating sambussa just a few doors down. The Shadow Lounge coffee bar and performance space sits around the corner on Baum Boulevard.

Watching a new stream of people in suits looking over the neighborhood structures with a mixture of hope and concern are the merchants of Centre 6000 EastSide, a group formed three months ago to work on issues from broken parking meters to building off customer traffic from the Whole Foods crowds.

Originally, the members of Centre 6000 EastSide were mainly those with businesses on Centre Avenue where a cluster of antique and home-related shops began bringing people back to East Liberty long ago. "We had all kind of sensed that our street was kind of ground zero for development in East Liberty," said Kate M. Bagin, who moved her Kate Morrison Design home textile business to 6010 Centre about 18 months ago.

Now the group meets, on average, once a week. The members have pulled together to get flower pots out on the street, with a bit of help from Home Depot.

They recently sent a letter to the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority asking for work to be done to ease regular flooding of basements along the street, a problem that they contend may convince the Artists & Craftsman store to move out when its lease expires next year.

The idea of a large store anchoring the corner of Penn and Centre makes a certain sense to Bagin, who could see a sort of retail triangle being formed between that site, the Home Depot on North Highland and Whole Foods on Centre.

Her concerns range from the impact that future development might have on rents paid by small businesses to fears that a project on the Mosites site could be out-of-scale to the neighborhood, as some have complained about a three-story Rite Aid that's completing construction at the intersection of Forbes and Murray avenues in Squirrel Hill.

"I feel this area has achieved these delicate sprouts," Bagin said of East Liberty. "Now is not the time to introduce huge environmental change."

Even those suggesting bring in another mass merchant wince at the idea of another structure such as the Home Depot store with its huge parking fields. Attinson noted big-box retailers, even the hardware chain itself, have begun developing models more adapted to urban markets. In Stamford, Conn., for example, Target is building a two-level store on top of multi-level parking.

Of course, even if one of the big mass merchants was ready to step into East Liberty today, it could take a few years to make room. Key sites identified by Street-Works have other uses just now, including the Penn Circle Tower that is providing housing for residents moved out of the Liberty Park and East Mall apartment towers the city plans to demolish.

In the past couple of years, there's already been change in the core, which is fine with the Street-Work strategists. Clothing stores such as Sneaker Villa and Hip Hop City have joined established shops. A Family Dollar store has taken the site formerly occupied by Keystone Plumbing.

The consulting group's plan calls for working around the edges of East Liberty and leaving the interior to evolve naturally with the efforts of small, local retailers and developers who specialize in working with historic buildings. Attinson said, "East Liberty's got great bones and great DNA."