We spend a lot of time in this city fixing grand mistakes of years past.

Public officials, private developers and community activists have spent years coaxing East Liberty back after business withered there when the city created a traffic moat called Penn Circle, preventing cars from passing through the retail corridor that planners had envisioned as a pedestrian mall.

The old asphalt sea surrounding Three Rivers Stadium is now the site of office buildings, restaurants and a hotel, not least because the city brought back much of the original street grid obliterated in the 1960s.

On Tuesday night, a few dozen North Siders gathered high in an Allegheny Center office building that looks out over another frizzled dream of the 1960s, a mall that is no more.

For many in the crowd, reconnecting East and West Ohio Street has been a long-held dream. For more than 40 years, motorists have had to drive around Allegheny Center on the four-lane circle some derisively call "The Speedway.''

Drivers must detour through ridiculous stoplights preventing right turns despite no through traffic in the right hand lanes, making potentially three or four stops on a journey round a mall has been in a retail coma for more than 15 years.

Three branch banks, a shoe repair shop and a coffee kiosk are the only retail outlets left. The mall has found second life as an office park, but it's not full. Walking its second floor yesterday morning made a fellow feel like Will Smith in "I Am Legend'': People had vanished.

The east-west corridor through Allegheny Center, designed as an outdoor pedestrian mall, doesn't attract many either. Urban walkers instinctively trod places within sight of auto traffic, for safety's sake. More walkers are in the surrounding park, or along North Avenue, than on the isolated Allegheny Center pathways, particularly at night.

The route includes a sunken fountain area, known by some as "The Ashtray'' because it hasn't spouted water in years. Around 10:20 a.m. yesterday, the sun shone brightly upon empty benches and sidewalks. The pedestrian mall looked as it might have in the architect's rendering, had he forgotten to draw in walkers.

Most in the Tuesday night audience knew the center's story before Doug Suisman, a Southern California architect, summarized it. The area had been the heart of old Allegheny City. The "diamond" where the anti-fountain now stands had been a park in John Redick's 1784 layout, a plan "stunning in its simplicity and clarity,'' says Mr. Suisman.

That park was in the center of a "square doughnut'' comprising 36 blocks of homes, churches and businesses, a downtown surrounded, in turn, by Allegheny Commons, a park surrounded, in turn, by walkable neighborhoods.

Blowing the center away in the 1960s for a mall that died in the 1990s is "one of the saddest chapters in the history of American cities,'' Mr. Suisman has written. Though beautiful 19th-century homes remain in surrounding neighborhoods -- Manchester, Allegheny West, Central North Side/Mexican War Streets and Deutschtown/East Allegheny -- they surround this disconnected concrete island.

I say none of this as a dispassionate observer. I live just west of the big park and our daughters attend grade school at the northwest corner of the traffic circle. I'm convinced surrounding neighborhoods won't near their full vibrancy until they're reconnected.

So, yes, reconnect East and West Ohio Street, and bring Federal Street down from the north to at least partially restore the historic intersection, as a T.

This meeting was sparked by the Children's Museum's desire for more parking and a green park on the site of the waterless, concrete depression near its entrance. Bringing back the northern part of the old street grid would be one way to pick up parking spaces.

Most at the meeting, including City Councilwoman Darlene Harris, seemed to like the idea. But not everyone agrees. A few like the pedestrian mall as it exists. A couple of people also pointed out that the white audience didn't fully represent the North Side, and any renewal plan needs to involve more neighbors.

Rights of way for reconnecting the streets have been preserved, according to city transportation planner Pat Hassett, but the city needs to track traffic before saying it's a good idea.

That shouldn't take long.