It was a scene straight out of Norman Rockwell.

The marching band kept blatting away while the high school musicians were doing little dance moves. The cheerful townspeople stamped their feet and blew on their frozen fingers, refusing to let the bitter wind disrupt the celebration. Schoolchildren huddled and shivered in their chairs.

An honor guard of gray-haired veterans presented the flag, then politicians started taking the stage, promising to keep their speeches short and then making them long. It was classic Americana.

And all for a Super Rite-Aid?

"You see that construction over there," County Executive Dan Onorato said at ground-breaking for a Super Rite-Aid Friday. "What that tells me is that you have private developers who realize that McKees Rocks is a place you want to invest in. They want to put their money here because these are good people down here and there's a market to be served."

That private developer is Trinity Development of Emsworth, which has bought McKees Rocks Plaza, is building the $3 million Super Rite-Aid there and is planning to put another $1 million into a new facade, lighting plan and name -- Chartiers Crossing -- for the rest of the plaza.

There are also plans for an Aldi's grocery store and a Popeye's Fried Chicken.

Trinity partner Craig Rippole said the firm is ready to go a lot further in McKees Rocks. And it is not alone; what the cheerful townspeople were truly celebrating was the growing coalition looking to rebuild the hard-scrabble industrial town.

Taris Vrcek, director of the McKees Rocks Community Development Corporation, noted that public projects on lower Chartiers Avenue and a master plan for the old Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad property, together with a redone plaza, promise a new face for the town.

"We begin to connect the dots and connect the pieces and look at other historic buildings we've acquired on Chartiers Avenue and you begin to see a new downtown developing, a new destination for the region," he said.

Mr. Rippole, a McKees Rocks native, said that is not as far-fetched as it might sound.

"If you were a retailer, and you were looking on paper and took 'McKees Rocks' off of there -- 100,000 people in a three-mile radius, all that traffic count ... you look at a picture, and aerial, all those rooftops, you're like, 'my gosh, sign me up!' " he said in an interview after the celebration.

There are obvious physical hurdles in moving toward such a future. The P&LE property, which is key to every redevelopment plan, has environmental challenges and is now in the hands of multiple owners. Infrastructure -- roads and sewer and waterlines -- would have to be upgraded. The P&LE buildings themselves, though they are masterpieces of 19th-century architecture, would take extensive renovation for large-scale reuse.

But the biggest hurdles Mr. Rippole sees are psychological.

"You drive by that railroad property every day and you never see it as a Wal-Mart; you never see it as an office park," he said. "Pittsburgh's just that way. You see the same place every day and you can't get far enough back from it to see the potential."

But Mr. Rippole said people of his generation -- he is 36, and went to Sto-Rox High School with Mr. Vrcek -- may be able to look at things with fresher eyes. For one thing, he is too young to remember when the rail facilities were in operation; he is not shackled by the memory of what was.

"With McKees Rocks there's always been this: Go to school, make it, move to Robinson," he said. He'd like to see a different attitude: "Your obligation is to do well here, go out and make something of yourself and come back and contribute back to the community."

Mr. Rippole, who lives in Moon but said he would buy the first house in the first new development in McKees Rocks, said his heart got heavily involved with this project. His partners, he said, kept checking with him, asking him if he was sure it made financial sense.

But he said those partners are converts now, drawn by the population, the traffic and unique aspects like the waterfront view of downtown.

"We will look at every project in McKees Rocks," he said. "We like the community; my heart's in it, now my partners' hearts are in it."

And judging by the crowd on hand Friday, a lot of other hearts are in it as well.