Second of two parts

Within Pittsburgh's city limits, Mount Washington, with its million-dollar views and penny-ante feuds, is rivaled by perhaps only the Hill District when it comes to its capacity for tribal warfare.

Opinionated residents form alliances. The blue-collar faction aligned behind Frank Valenta, a former labor organizer skilled at politicking, often is in agreement with Paul Renne's supporters who, like Mr. Renne (a former H.J. Heinz chief financial officer ), typically are from a more professional class.

These groups can find themselves feuding with the more environmentally conscious Mount Washington residents -- those who have worked to preserve Grandview Park and its hillside trees. The people who live closer Bailey and Boggs avenues, the former with its stately brick homes and the latter with its neglected business strip, feel overlooked by the rest. And then there are the Mount's independent stakeholders, those like Chuck Wallace, who owns Wallace Florist and a dozen more parcels on Virginia Avenue.

They're not uniquely querulous. Before Mr. Renne and Mr. Valenta were feuding with Mr. Wallace, the likes of Sam Spatter, Philip Baskin, Gil Kaib, Dr. Paul Petraglia and William Kerschbaumer were doing the same, arguing over hotel projects and zoning changes, slinging mud or, in Mr. Kaib's case, even suing the city.

The infighting can be demoralizing, and it's one of the reasons many business and property owners say that Mount Washington, for all of its built-in potential, is losing some of the luster that made it one of the most livable neighborhoods in America's most livable city.

"We're going backwards, in my opinion," Mr. Wallace said.

Backward, forward, or stagnant -- it's a critical crossroads for Mount Washington, as it considers a new business blueprint, mulls zoning changes for Virginia Avenue and searches for a new director for it development board, hoping to settle on a vision for the neighborhood.

But whose vision?

It's a good thing, the rivals say about each other, that so many care so deeply about the community. But with so many people rushing forth to be the standard-bearers of the Mount, it's easy for legs to get tangled: Older residents are leery of newcomers. Homeowners are aggravated by landlords and renters.

Paul Tellers, former president of the Mount Washington Community Development Corporation, recalls the hostility he sometimes faced because he lived in Chatham Village, a community of brick townhomes sequestered from the rest of the Mount.

"When a person from Chatham Village offers an opinion, some people would say, 'What do you care? This doesn't affect you,'" he said.

There are possibly two things that everyone can agree on -- that they are tired of waiting for Craig Cozza, the developer who has the zoning approval to build two condo towers along Grandview Avenue, to go ahead and finally build. And they're tired of waiting for someone to raze the Edge, the boarded-up Grandview restaurant owned by opthamologist Francis Hurite.

"Isn't that a shame?" Mr. Valenta said. "Where the hell is city hall on this one?"

But even in these cases, the neighborhood bears at least a bit of culpability. "We continue to get lawsuits from the neighbor behind us," said Mr. Cozza of his planned 10-story tower in the 1400 block of Grandview. "We can't get any momentum there."

And several developers have expressed interest in the Edge site, near the Monongahela Incline, but they've been shooed away by residents worried about traffic, parking, eminent domain and the structural integrity of the hillside, which drops toward a recessed area of Mount Washington known as The Saddle. "We have to be one of the only communities that has ever chased the Ritz-Carlton away," said Mr. Wallace.

The Ritz-Carlton project had its innate problems -- namely, an inability to secure financing. But that was years ago, in the early 1990s. More recently, local developer Luke Desmone proposed a luxury hotel and apartment for the Edge site, and word is that he is interested again, though neither Mr. Desmone nor Dr. Hurite could be reached.

But as history has shown, mere interest in Mount Washington isn't nearly enough. You also have to win the minds of its most politically active residents.

"There are the people who live on Grandview," said Common Pleas Court Judge Alan Hertzberg, and "then there's everybody else up there."

The Census seems to back him up. The median income of those in the 15211 ZIP code was $34,000 in 2000. But those earning more than $200,000 annually had $246.7 million in aggregate income, compared to $22.2 million combined for everyone else.

"Everyone else" might not mind new retail shops, he suggested, but the Grandview crowd has the time and resources to fight whatever it doesn't like.

Mr. Hertzberg is a veteran of these Mount Washington battlegrounds. A former city councilman, he represented Mount Washington, and his time on council was marked by ongoing contests over zoning and development on the Mount. The biggest came four years ago, when he was on the losing side of a fight to allow more high-density housing on Grandview. Council voted 8-1 to create a special zoning label for Grandview Avenue, limiting new buildings to 40 feet and restricting the number of housing units in one building. The zoning campaign was led by Mr. Renne and his wife, Joyce.

Mr. Hertzberg contrasts his experiences in Mount Washington to the West End, which he also represented while on City Council. "They were development-hungry down there," he said. That hunger has begun to pay dividends, with new shops and restaurants in what still is a transitional neighborhood.

"I understand the people's perspective -- the longtime residents, they don't want to see things change," he said. "But this is one of the key locations in Pittsburgh. I always felt we needed to take advantage of it."

That phrase "take advantage" has two meanings. Developers want to take advantage of the view, the moneyed homeowners and the built-in tourist draw. But many of the neighborhood stalwarts feel the would-be developers want to take advantage of the community and its people, buying up tracts of residential homes and plopping a big box, like the Virginia Avenue Rite Aid pharmacy, in its place.

"If he wants to live across the street from a Burger King, that's fine," said Michele Cunko, whose duplex sits near the Rite Aid and across from the properties owned by Mr. Wallace.

"But I don't."

Changes comes slowly, by result. The Edge restaurant has been empty since 1979. And it took 15 years to raze the former St. Mary of the Mount High School, a prime bit of Grandview Avenue real estate that was a magnet for derelicts and vandals until a developer agreed to build some townhouses there.

The pace of progress there isn't uncommon among post-industrial cities, of course, but in neighborhood unanimously agreed to have so much potential, it's especially frustrating.

"There's enough people on Mount Washington that are uncomfortable with change that it's not a fertile ground for development," Mr. Tellers said.

And so development, for the time being, will come bit-by-bit, and not in the sweeping, neighborhood-altering way that it's come to, say, East Liberty. That's where the Main Street planning, led by the CDC, comes in, recruiting businesses that are good fits for certain streets. Shiloh, for example, which connects with Grandview near the Monongahela Incline, seems a better fit for tourist gift shops and restaurants (one survey said 13 percent of the people who shop on Shiloh are tourists or from out of town). Virginia and Boggs may better suited for neighborhood services such as groceries, delis, bakeries, doctors offices and dry cleaners.

If Mount Washington is to rebound from its self-diagnosed malaise, it will require a greater degree of cooperation and communication than has been customary, said Pete Karlovich, whose glassy modern mansion on Bailey Avenue is one of the biggest single-family investments the area has ever seen. Last fall, he ran for, and was elected to, Mount Washington's CDC. "We've made a fairly large investment up here," he said, speaking for himself and partner Steve Herforth. Now, "we turned our attention to the rest of the neighborhood."

They bought a house across the street, and are in the process of turning it into a high-end duplex. Two blocks to the west, they've purchased a commercial building, updating the apartments on the top floors and the retail space on the bottom. They've also had their eyes on other nearby buildings with potential, and with city views.

Mr. Karlovich believes others with deep pockets see the benefit of a piecemeal approach, citing several residential and commercial buildings that have changed hands recently and are being renovated, without much community opposition. Now, he said, "there are some folks who are trying to do some things."

But then, people have been trying to do things there for years. Getting things done is something else altogether.