Like so many other former mill towns in Western Pennsylvania, New Kensington has struggled to reinvent itself since 1971, when Alcoa closed its original riverfront plant complex that once provided jobs, revenue and community identity.

Population shrank nearly in half, from 26,000 in the early 1970s to about 14,000. Businesses moved to malls or suburban commercial strips. Buildings that housed them decayed.

Tax revenues shrank. Crime rates surged to the point that municipal leaders joked grimly that the only way the Allegheny Valley city attracted attention was in news reports of shootings on its seedier downtown streets.

But six years after launching an aggressive campaign to combat crime, enforce building codes, find new uses for vacant properties and recruit businesses, leaders and residents of the Westmoreland County town are seeing results that buoy them about prospects of resurrecting their struggling downtown.

"It's a really exciting time for New Kensington," said council member and native Tom Guzzo, 47.

"[Older] people here still remember the heyday, when you couldn't find a parking spot Downtown. Will we do that again? I don't know, but there are a lot of wonderful things we can do and are doing."

What's new

In recent months, New Kensington leaders have watched a contractor put finishing touches on a stylish new apartment complex for senior citizens where an eyesore of an abandoned school once stood.

They've seen ground broken last month for a new branch of Westmoreland County Community College. They expect the $6 million education and career link center will create more than 700 jobs and spur coffee shops, bookstores and complementary businesses to seek space in nearby buildings.

They've also kicked off the second $1.1 million phase of a plan to revitalize the down-at-the-heels Fifth Avenue corridor, where the community college development will be located.

Existing businesses have expanded and a diabetes center and MRI suite moved into the Alle Kiski Medical Center.

Perhaps most encouraging of all, city leaders have begun fielding calls from light industrial companies and commercial developers interested in finding new uses for rundown but serviceable buildings. They're cajoling those firms to move downtown or into the adjacent, privately owned Schreiber Industrial Park, which hugs the river where Alcoa once manufactured cookware and other aluminum items.

"For us to go from zero calls to someone interested in property is a whole big step. Now we're getting calls all the time," said Mayor Frank Link, who has been in office six years. "One of our biggest problems now is finding space for people who want to come in."

Mr. Link said he ran for office in 2001 with other candidates for City Council who shared a determination not only to lure jobs but to address increasing problems with drug-related crime and deteriorating buildings downtown. Community surveys showed that the primary concern of residents was crime.

"We definitely had a perception problem," he said. "There was a perception that you came to New Kensington for drugs, for violent crime and not much else. We had a lot of pieces to put together to get this puzzle completed."

Cleaning up

City leaders put together a plan that called for doubling its residential building code enforcement staff, hiring a private firm to enforce codes in residential buildings and directing those workers to take a sharply different, assertive approach of alerting property owners and members of a landlord-tenant organization to get into compliance -- or else.

"Six [or] seven years ago, you might drive through New Kensington and see a car up on blocks ... or a washing machine on a porch," said council member John W. Regoli Jr. "You will not see any of that today. Nobody got a pass."

With neighboring Arnold, New Kensington also joined Pennsylvania's Weed and Seed initiative, promoted a veteran officer, Chuck Korman, to head the police department and sought help from state police and other law enforcement agencies to boost patrols, investigate drug traffic and reduce drug sales and other crime. Neighborhood watch groups knocked crime down further, Chief Korman said.

The 118 major crimes reported between July and September were a 35 percent decline from the 180 major crimes reported during the same quarter last year, the chief said. Less serious crimes also declined, from 192 reported during that quarter last year to 156 this year. The last homicide was in June 2006; the last shooting also occurred last year, he said.

"Things don't happen overnight, but there is real progress here," the chief said. "Now we have to convince people from outside [the city]."

Finding the funds

City leaders also have drawn on the ideas and energy of Kimberly A. McAfoose, the can't-sit-still executive director of New Kensington's Redevelopment Authority.

Under her direction, the authority has successfully sought federal, state and private funding and grants and has condemned, purchased and demolished buildings that were too tumble-down to save. It found new housing in stable residential neighborhoods and first-time homeowner programs for residents of those squalid structures.

To recoup demolition costs, the authority placed liens on some properties and cleared land for more productive uses, particularly in areas zoned for light industrial uses sought by numerous developers and companies. It brought in university students and private firms to develop streetscape plans and obtained an Enterprise Zone designation, making businesses eligible for tax credits or special financing.

An early success, Mr. Regoli said, was a deal brokered for construction of the Valley Sports ice rink and athletic complex in Falcons Park. The $4.6 million complex opened in 2003 and began drawing outsiders to the city.

As one of New Kensington's chief cheerleaders, Ms. Mc-Afoose continues to match potential businesses with available properties.

She enthuses about New Kensington's schools, parks and hilltop residential neighborhoods, its proximity to Route 28, the Pennsylvania Turnpike and other roads recently widened to four lanes or improved and the future prospects for a commuter train link to Pittsburgh.

Ms. McAfoose is so committed to her vision for an invigorated New Kensington that she paid repeated visits during construction of the neatly landscaped stone headquarters of Geo-Solutions Inc., an environmental equipment company that was first to build on property cleared during the Fifth Avenue renewal project.

During another recent drop-in stop, she nixed a "really crappy" terra-cotta shade of paint for hallways in the soon-to-be-completed 40-unit Ridge Avenue Senior Apartments, which already has more than 100 applications from would-be tenants.

Among her latest favorite projects: finding occupants for the former home of a Tile City store on Fifth Avenue, the former Dattola theater a block away and a stately Art Deco-trimmed building off Freeport Road that once housed Alcoa's laboratory.

She and other New Kensington leaders acknowledge that plenty of work lies ahead, particularly along Fifth Avenue, where some sagging buildings are sinking into their cellars and others are boarded up and plastered with condemnation placards.

But they are heartened by the response they're receiving from once-apathetic residents who now are eager to join volunteer street clean-up programs and from out-of-town developers who, not that long ago, wouldn't return their calls.

"My mother and father were from Braddock and it makes you so sad to just drive down those streets, where it's all [boarded] up and just awful," said developer Steve Kubrick, 46, who moved from Churchill to his wife's hometown of New Kensington 18 years ago. After working on the Ridge Avenue senior complex, he's now helping woo others like him to New Kensington.

"We brought people in [in October] and they're licking their chops. These buildings are beautiful, well worth saving," Mr. Kubrick said. "There's a lot of potential."