Imagine entering McKees Rocks on a bridge crossing a park-lined waterway with an office park to the left and a marina and luxurious condominiums overlooking a riverfront trail to the right.

Ahead is a bright new street-front shopping area and an open-air market. A sign directs visitors to the Old Town block, where a theater and an arts center anchor a neighborhood of shops and ethnic restaurants in restored historic buildings.

And, an expanse of lawn leads to a huge, ornate convention center, like a Greek temple rendered in red brick. Beyond it, the onion domes of eastern churches pierce the sky.

This is the McKees Rocks envisioned by Taris Vrcek.

"There's just so much there that's just a little bit beyond our reach," said Mr. Vrcek, director of the McKees Rocks Community Development Corp. "Each month we move a little bit closer and maybe we can grab one piece. You know it's out there; you know the potential's out there; you can see it."

You can see it, that is, through Mr. Vrcek's imagination.

With ordinary eyes, the entrance he envisions actually takes a side road over Chartiers Creek. Windowless back walls of industrial buildings stand along the river where he imagines the marina and condos. The office park is a parking lot for the McKees Rocks Plaza; the shopping district is the Hays Manor public housing project.

The boulevard, which would enable truck traffic to bypass Chartiers Avenue, does not exist; the Old Town area is in the birthing stages and weed-grown empty lots obscure the magnificent 1882 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie locomotive repair shop, which is itself slowly crumbling from lack of upkeep.

Around that core, the rest of the town is crumbling as well, with one-third of the population it had in 1930, a parade of homes sold into the absentee-landlord rental market and ongoing problems with drugs and other crime. McKees Rocks boomed with the railroad in the 1880s, but has been slowly dying since the railroad industry crashed in the 1960s.

It's a process Mr. Vrcek and a number of others would like to reverse.

"We see that vision," he said Monday, in the aftermath of a Friday conference on McKees Rocks development possibilities. "We look at it and we know what it could be. It's so compelling that when you know that it's all possible you can't turn away from it."

The conference, hosted by Ohio Valley General Hospital in Kennedy, assembled about 50 community and business leaders and development officials to review the town's strategic plan, to see what is being accomplished and to dream collectively about what could be.

It included a review of the 2003 strategic plan -- the plan which includes the boulevard, the shops, the marina, the condos and the reworked P&LE building -- a tour of the town's development sites and a brainstorming session.

"Friday I think was a real milestone for our community," Mr. Vrcek said. "The feedback I've received since then has been excellent across the board. I started to really get a feel for it in the afternoon [brainstorming] session, to see how people's wheels were turning and to see all those ideas coming out and to see that there was really a collective energy in the room."

Energy would be good, because what the CDC is trying to accomplish is not easy. The former P&LE property is key to redevelopment on a grand scale, and it is lacking roads and utilities, needs to be assessed for hazardous materials and is in the hands of multiple owners.

The Allegheny County Economic Development department has been working on the property for years, researching uses and ownership and seeking development proposals.

Representatives of the state Department of Environmental Protection at the conference Friday said the state has gone to great lengths to pave the way for redevelopment of so-called brownfields -- land previously put to industrial use and left contaminated.

"We're here to help you guys," DEP's Mike Watson said. "You bring us the piece of property, we'll make it work."

The CDC's job is to serve as a catalyst and to use its nonprofit status to help potential developers get access to grants, loans and tax credits.

"It's going to take a real collaborative effort with lots of parties at the table and everyone putting in their piece," Mr. Vrcek said. "But the encouraging thing is that all the ingredients are out there. What we need to do is to find private developers to partner with."

Some pieces are already falling into place. Since it was founded in 2003, the CDC has helped broker deals that put the old Roxian Theater and three other buildings on lower Chartiers Avenue into new hands.

Redevelopment efforts are under way at the theater, which would fill a niche in the Pittsburgh market and provide a boost to the whole neighborhood.

"When 1,400 people pour out of this place after a concert, they're going to need to eat, going to want to buy a newspaper, going to need gas," project manager Andrew Heber said.

The theater is across the street from the Regis Ryan Cultural and Arts Center, which is being developed by Focus on Renewal as a center for classes and is near the other buildings the CDC is helping to redevelop.

Perhaps the biggest recent news, though, was the sale of McKees Rocks Plaza to Trinity Development, which is tearing down the Wendy's Restaurant to make way for a Super Rite Aid and is planning a number of upgrades.

Eventually, Mr. Vrcek said, Trinity is interested in redoing the plaza in accord with the strategic plan.

There also is a potential buyer for much of the railroad property north of the P&LE buildings, a buyer working with the CDC and within the strategic plan. The hope is to develop that area as an industrial park and move the Lockhart complex from River Road where it occupies land with direct access to the Ohio and an extraordinary view of Brunot's Island and Downtown into the industrial park and free up that land for a marina and condominiums or something else that capitalizes on the river access.

That, of course, means finding an investor prepared to build an industrial park and finding another prepared to develop the riverfront -- and helping both of them through the environmental hurdles involved.

It's worth it, Mr. Vrcek said.

"This is home; I've lived here all my life, and the people here are basically extended family," he said. "To see all the people that I care about, the good people leaving, and at the same time to see all the assets, I just feel drawn to it. It's been like a calling. ... I could not turn away from this."