Of the many images the Strip District brings to mind, for most people, neighborhood isn't one of them. Yet Cindy Cassellsleeps through the wooo of the morning train past her loft on Smallman Street, Dorothy Hooks' newspaper usually lands short of her stoop on Mulberry Way and Ray Klavon can see Troy Hill from the bathroom window of his Penn Avenue apartment.

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Cindy Cassell looks over the Strip District from her condo in the Strip Lofts on Smallman Street. She has lived there for 6 1/2 years. Click photo for larger image.

They are three of 266 officially counted residents of the Strip District, the third-least-populated city neighborhood after Chateau and South Shore. Without lawns and driveways, 266 people can escape notice in the bustle of night-lifers and market shoppers.

But a new picture is emerging amid the miniboom of factories and warehouses being turned into homes. By fall of next year, the Strip stands to more than double its 2000 census count simply with the lease of 298 condos in the former Armstrong Cork Factory at 24th and Smallman streets. If just one person lives in each unit, Strip residents would suddenly outnumber those of each of the neighborhoods of the West End, Ridgemont, Hays, Esplen, East Carnegie, Arlington Heights and Allegheny West.

It's an exciting time to be a neighbor in the Strip, said Cassell, who moved from Squirrel Hill into her 1,600-square-foot loft in 1999. She was one of the first tenants of the Strip Lofts, a former water-heater manufacturing site. The Cork Factory will be the next of several projects that started with the Brakehouse Lofts at 25th Street and Liberty Avenue.

"I'm a live-work-play-in-the-same-neighborhood kind of person," Cassell said, "but living in an urban environment is a learning process. I sometimes do miss seeing lawns." Instead, she has a 100-square-foot brick balcony, dripping with flowers in pots, which looks toward Downtown. The interior floor is polished concrete. A few walls in her open floor plan leave space between the top of the walls and the ceilings.

"My mom said if I didn't enclose the bedroom and bath, she wouldn't come visit me."

Cassell describes her building community as "women in their 50s, young single men, a family with a new baby, some empty-nesters and young couples."

One of the young couples is made up of Maggie Ferris, a paralegal, and Joshua Freedman, a mortgage broker. They moved from Monroeville in February to a loft down the hall from Cassell.

One of the selling points, Ferris said, was "being able to walk to the market and bring home fresh ingredients. And I get 10 hours of my life back every week not being in rush-hour traffic."

"I was constantly mowing," Freedman said. "I don't have time to take care of a yard."

Almost no one who lives in the Strip has a lick of green space. The most concentrated group of traditional houses line the sidewalk between 24th and 27th streets on Penn Avenue.

The Strip District is shaped like a long cut of meat and hugs the Allegheny River immediately northeast of Downtown, from 11th to 33rd streets. In the old days, when the railway ran along the river, boats and railcars off-loaded produce and other supplies to wholesalers.

As the number of produce wholesalers in the Strip decreased over the years, some of the survivors opened retail stores. Nightclubs entered the scene in the early '90s. The concentration of restaurants and fresh-food markets between 16th and 22nd streets draws 3,000 to 5,000 people on Saturdays alone, said Becky Rodgers, executive director of Neighbors in the Strip.

Along with 266 residents, the Strip is home to 367 businesses, which is why living space is "such an important piece of the puzzle," Rodgers said.

Bonn and Art McSorley stand next in line to provide cluster housing in an old building. On Smallman, near the base of the 31st Street Bridge, the former Springfield Public School, known as the Pink Building, will become 14 luxury condos, with construction to begin this fall. The $2 million remodeling job will add a parking garage in back, Bonn McSorley said.

She and her husband bought the building in 2000. She recalled him asking, "What would you do with that pink building?"

"And I said, 'Everything!' "

The condos will start at about $250,000. They will be one, two and three stories, from 1,500 to 3,000 square feet, some with 14-foot ceilings. The McSorleys, who live in North Huntingdon, will keep one for themselves.

"The pink says Pittsburgh can have a positive attitude in a fun and interesting way," said Bonn, a Dallas native. "I feel so much positive flow being in the Strip."

Hooks, born and raised in the Strip, sees truth in the adage, "What was old is new again." Hooks, 74, was active for years in Strip District community groups. She sold barbecued ribs on street corners for 28 years as Miss Dillie.

She says the Strip is two different worlds, the day life and the nightlife, but she could just as well mean income disparity.

"They say the Cork lofts will go for a quarter- to half a million dollars," she said. "Can you imagine?" Contemplating, she added, "It's probably still cheaper than having two cars and commuting from the suburbs."

Average income among residents in the Strip is less than $20,000 now. Tax credits and funding sources that favor low-income neighborhoods will dry up once the Cork Factory is filled, said Cassell, the resident representative of Neighbors in the Strip.

When she moved into the Strip Lofts, they were selling for $120,000 to $700,000. The lowest Brakehouse rents are $850. Cork Factory units must rent for five years before they can be sold, a condition of the U.S. Park Service's historic tax credits. Chuck Hammel, the Cork Factory owner and chief executive officer of Pitt-Ohio Trucking, said rents would range from $800 for small, low-level apartments to $2,600 for a three-bedroom with a city view.

Hammel bought the Cork Factory in 1996 after years of expectation and failed efforts to develop it into condos.

"I went to the bankruptcy auction to meet the new owner," he said, "but nobody bid. So I walked away the new owner."

He teamed with Bob Beynon, another Strip District businessman. "It needed a lot of money, and a lot of people didn't think people wanted to live in an urban area," he said.

After several developers hit snags, McCaffery Interests, of Chicago, came along. "They were able to get this monster tamed." The project is costing $58 million, which includes a parking garage.

Anne Mullaney got on the waiting list immediately. The Cork Factory is two blocks toward the river from Mullaney's Harp & Fiddle, the Penn Avenue pub she owns with her brother.

"We bought the pub 14 years ago, anticipating development of the Cork Factory," she said. "All this time, it's been a neighborhood pub in need of a neighborhood. I kept wanting to get back to the city, and I kept holding out for the Cork. What a difference it made just to sandblast it."

Mullaney, president of Neighbors in the Strip, recently married Senior U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. They are selling their houses in McCandless to live together in the Strip.

"That's what I was planning to do before we got married," Mullaney said, "to live two blocks from the pub. And I work in Oxford Center [Downtown, as a partner at Thorp Reed & Armstrong], which is walkable. So I have my little triangle."

Klavon moved back to the Strip in 1979 after having spent much of his childhood there. His grandparents owned and operated a drugstore at Penn and 28th Street and lived on the second floor. When Klavon's grandfather died, he moved from Shadyside to the second-floor apartment "to keep an eye on the building, because the area was almost abandoned." He boarded up the second-floor windows to protect his childhood memories from vandals.

Almost 20 years later, after Rick Sebak's "Strip Show" filmed the light coming into his grandfather's old store through west-facing amber windows, he was inspired. After retiring as an elementary school art teacher, he opened Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor in 1999, keeping the original lighting, fixtures, stools and marble soda fountain counter. He continues to live upstairs, renting out the third floor.

"Ever since I moved in, there's been plans for the Cork building," he said. "It was all marked up and filthy, and trees were growing from the roof. Now you can see that it's a beautiful piece of architecture.

"Not only will it be good for business to have 300 new residents, I'll have 300 new neighbors. At least."