Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Dorothy Cusick, 90, grew up and raised a family in Hazelwood along Second Avenue. Her family's tavern is behind her at the intersection with Elizabeth Street. Click photo for larger image.

The brick building at Elizabeth Street and Second Avenue is the heart of Dorothy Cusick's Hazelwood. It was where her family's business, Ciaramella's bar, and their upstairs apartment looked across the avenue at St. Stephen Church.

The building is lifeless, its street level windows boarded. A Victorian-era three-story with mission-tile pent roofs, it will be razed if the Mon-Fayette Expressway gets that far.

Mrs. Cusick recently turned 90. Her life spans Hazelwood's heyday and decline. She uses memories to see the neighborhood as it used to be, while a tangible connection to the past remains in a core of businesses hanging on along Second Avenue.

One recent day, the aroma of smoked kielbasa filled Dimperio's Market, where Mike Dimperio, who grew up a block away, was stocking inventory. He has been a grocer on Second Avenue for most of his 66 years.

"Business is way off," he said. "I've been jumped, and there's a bullet hole in my file cabinet. But I don't want to be a quitter. The older people depend on us, and we have people [former residents] who come back to buy meat."

Mr. Dimperio's father started the market in 1929. It moved to its current location in 1940, when he was born. Now, he works alongside his own son.

"My son said, 'If you're not here, I'm not going to be here,' but with me, it's in the blood. One day I was shopping at GNC and subconsciously started lining up the vitamin bottles."

Like the rest of the Steel Valley, Hazelwood saw its economy go down a hole when heavy industry left. It inspires little investment now, in part due to uncertainty of the Mon-Fayette Expressway's progress.

Jim Richter, executive director of the Hazelwood Initiative, said the University of Pittsburgh did a marketing study for Second Avenue, "but the prognosis isn't even cautiously optimistic because we're hamstrung waiting to find out if the expressway is going to happen."

In 1950, 20,734 people lived in the combined Hazelwood-Glen Hazel-Glenwood census district. In 1962, the neighborhood had 210 functioning storefronts, eight of them independent grocers.

By 2005, the neighborhood had 5,334 residents, 38 percent of whom were drawing Social Security, and none of its schools remain open.

The elderly population supports both a Rite Aid and Sandy Darling's Elizabeth Pharmacy.

"We're expanding everything we can possibly expand," said Mr. Darling. "I hang on because I need the job."

Offering services the chains don't, like Western Union, money orders and bill collection for 50 companies, the pharmacy also carries people's bills over when they're short on money for prescriptions.

He will eventually turn the store over to a partner, but not in surrender. Hazelwood's condition is better than most people perceive, he said.

"Most of the time in the daytime, it's nice. We have a lot of senior citizens walking around. At night, no matter where you are, you could be in danger."

"It does kind of get you down, though," said Mr. Dimperio, "when you look at what's happening in other places with the makeovers, that we haven't had one."

Old photos show a density of architecture that Alex Bodnar describes as "toothy." Today, in the block across Second Avenue from his Hungarian restaurant, Jozsa Corner, just three "teeth" remain.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority owns two of them and all the vacant land on both sides of the block. It invested to poise the land for a tie-in with redevelopment of the old LTV coke plant.

"The URA tore down two buildings adjacent to me last year," said Mr. Bodnar, kneading with bear-like arms a pillow of dough for poppy seed rolls. "When I was a kid [in Hungary], everything from America was made to last. All top-notch products. Now, I'm afraid things are made to destroy.

"But I'm an optimist," he said with a broad smile. "I believe that what seems difficult may take a while and what seems impossible a while longer."

As Mr. Bodnar prepared for Easter orders, Mrs. Cusick had a clutch of family around her for her 90th birthday celebration. One day, her granddaughter, Leslie Houck, from California, drove her and Mrs. Cusick's daughter, Dorothy Barnishin, on a tour of the old sites.

"I didn't want to leave Hazelwood," said Mrs. Cusick, who lives with a granddaughter in West Mifflin. "I could walk for anything -- to the pharmacy, the church, the post office."

She studied the facade of the family's old bar, looked into memories of the upstairs apartment, at the arched doorway off the sidewalk. She worked there for her father before Prohibition and ran it herself after he died. She had married a Hazelwood boy, Regis Cusick, and had four children.

David O'Connor, the third-generation director of the funeral home beside it, owns the building now. Mr. O'Connor was coming out of the funeral home when he spotted her and bounded across the street.

She told him she was concerned about the building being demolished.

"I'll be 90 before that highway comes through," he said.

"I know," she said, "but warn me just in case, so I can fight for it."