The New Granada Theater, one of the Hill District's last distinctive icons, is $100,000 away from the $1.1 million lifeline on which its stabilization depends.

Patricia Smith of The Reinvestment Fund, a regional catalyst that has teamed with the Hill Community Development Corp., said the remainder "could come any day" in the form of a grant from the Allegheny County Community Infrastructure and Tourism Fund.

"We have had good talks with them," Ms. Smith said.

"On its last legs," as historian Laurence Glasco described it in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article earlier this year, the 1928 building is filled with debris from a partially collapsed roof. Architect Milton Ogot estimated that, with no intervention, the building has about two years left.

Mr. Ogot is on the team that will start the resurrection of what was once the most jumping spot in the neighborhood. Every big jazz band and singer took its stage and filled the second-floor ballroom dance floor.

Since going dark as a movie theater in the 1960s, the building has been on every preservationist's list of gems worth saving, but each in a series of would-be developers faded like the colors on the art deco facade.

The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation lent the community development corporation $99,000 in 1995 to buy the property. The Heinz Endowments, state Rep. Jake Wheatley and the state budget office have helped build the rescue fund.

History & Landmarks will administer the stabilization budget.

The second phase, renovation, will follow public brainstorming to decide the theater's future uses.

Marimba Milliones, head of the Hill Community Development Corp., said the Granada is "the linchpin to the redevelopment of the entire Centre Avenue corridor," which includes the new Carnegie Library branch that opened recently. Raising money "has been a challenge, but there is a lot of synergy now."

Hill resident David Monroe. 60, said he remembers the last days of the Savoy Ballroom when he was a kid and the movies he saw later.

"The last movie I saw there was 'Five Fingers of Death,' a karate movie," he said. "I'd like to see it come back as a theater."

Dan Holland founded the Young Preservationist Association of Pittsburgh in 2002 with the New Granada on his first list of Top 10 buildings that should be saved. He said the New Granada's fundraising "is a preservation success story that's a priority not just for the Hill but for Pittsburgh and, quite frankly, the nation. It's a critical site that must be saved."

The New Granada originally served as the Pythian Temple, lodge for the Knights of the Pythian, a brotherhood of construction workers. In the 1930s, it became the New Granada Theater, replacing an earlier Granada Theater two blocks away.

Mr. Ogot said the first phase will include steel roof supports to replace rotten wood and some new brick.

"If we don't stabilize the building soon," he said, "there won't be a building left."

For more information, call the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation at 412-471-5808. Checks to the New Granada Restoration can be mailed to the foundation at 100 W. Station Square Drive, Suite 450, Pittsburgh, PA 15219.