All three neighborhood schools are closed. So is the pool. Thousands of residents are lost, long-term plans for new highway connections and a massive brownfield redevelopment lay fallow, and now an 80-year-old grocery anchoring the Hazelwood business district is closing.

Still, stakeholders in the riverfront neighborhood bookended by the Glenwood Bridge to the south and the former LTV coke works to the north are so high on it, one wonders if coke residue has psychedelic properties.

"We have great potential. We're right on the cusp," says the Hazelwood Initiative's director Jim Richter.

"Anyone who looks at a map can see how strategic it is," says City Councilman Doug Shields, who represents the area. "It's the major portal to the southeast side of the city. It has potential galore."

"We're seeing a lot of positive things happening in the community," says Tim Smith, a Hazelwood organizer and pastor.

Hazelwood's trip has been all too familiar. Settled by wealthy families in the 19th century, it became a thriving working class neighborhood in the early 20th, supporting a long, winding business district along Second Avenue, with railroad tracks and the Monongahela River on one side, and a hillside housing community on the other.

When industry wound down (the coke works, the last steel plant in the city limits, closed 10 years ago, taking more than 750 jobs with it) so did the business district. Over the years, a dozen barbershops, an estimated 40 bars, a bowling alley, movie theater and other storefronts were shuttered. By 2000, it had just more than 6,000 residents, down from 17,000 in 1960.

The school district closed Gladstone Middle School in 2001 and the St. Stephen parochial school shut down in 2005. In 2006, over the howls of neighborhood leaders, Superintendent Mark Roosevelt closed Burgwin Elementary School, citing its excess capacity and low score in a Rand Corp. performance study.

The closing of Dimperio's Market, founded on Second Avenue in 1929, is the latest blow. Pointing to chronic shoplifting, the Dimperio family announced just before Christmas that it will close this month.

In Hazelwood, said 54-year resident Sam Stratti, "It's not just three strikes and you're out. We've been getting a fourth one and a fifth one."

The Dimperio's announcement spurred some soul-searching in the community, as well as some pushback on the crime claims. Neighborhood leaders say police probably could have handled the shoplifting incidents better, but that overall police presence has been laudable in the neighborhood, especially in efforts to address drug-dealing in the sliver of rowhouses tucked between the railroad tracks and the river.

Other factors were also in play, neighborhood officials said, which Hazelwood knows all too well: starting with the Century III Mall and later The Waterfront shopping district in Homestead, large retailers have been luring customers out of the neighborhood's mom-and-pop stores for decades.

The Hazelwood Initiative is trying to breathe life into the business district by working with the city Urban Redevelopment Authority to replace abandoned storefronts along Second Avenue with new businesses. While plans are for some neighborhood retail, much of it would be office space, serving spillover medical and university clients from landlocked Oakland.

"It's never going to be Mayberry again. Some folks know that and some are not giving up the past," Mr. Richter said.

The past and future of Hazelwood are inexorably tied to the 178-acre former coke works site. After LTV closed it in 1998 and the community fought efforts to replace it with another coke maker, four local foundations stepped forward to buy it for $10 million in 2002. Now dubbed the Almono site, it is managed by the Regional Industrial Development Corp. of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Plans have long called for housing, office, retail and park space, much like at South Side Works on the other former LTV mill site across the river. RIDC and foundation leaders have been trying to finalize a deal with a developer for years, first flirting with Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland and later with the Noisette Co. in South Carolina. Hazelwood leaders recently visited Noisette's redevelopment of the Navy Yard in North Charleston, S.C.

RIDC is trying to pin down a lead developer within the first quarter of this year, project manager Bill Widdoes said, but as with everything else, the global financial crisis is making a deal difficult.

The development group being targeted, which Mr. Widdoes would not identify, has "developments in other parts of country and are examining their navel a little bit. We're caught on the outside looking in, but they've continued to state their interest."

In the meantime, RIDC has continued site preparation, bringing in fill and examining its existing infrastructure and sewers. Mr. Widdoes said he is "still optimistic" that the first phase of redevelopment could simply link the site with the successful Pittsburgh Technology Center industrial park by the Hot Metal Bridge.

That would be a big step toward tying Hazelwood to Oakland, which community leaders see as the neighborhood's greatest hope. Hospital and university expansion in Oakland has devoured most of the land there, and Hazelwood has plenty to spare -- if it plays its cards right with the LTV site, officials say Second Avenue could become the next Carson or Butler street.

"No question, we are harnessing our wagons to the redevelopment of the LTV site. It if works, we're the next Lawrenceville," Mr. Richter said.

Delays are part and parcel of Hazelwood -- none of them longer than the Mon-Fayette Expressway. The 24-mile northern extension of the toll road was supposed to sluice through the Hazelwood riverside, but seems no closer to being built now than when ground broke on the highway system in 1973, partially due to its estimated $3.6 billion remaining price tag.

Some have held onto properties in the highway zone, hoping for easy government buyouts. Others have been abandoned.

"The problem is not what's happening, it's what doesn't happen," said Mr. Stratti, 78, of Blair Street. "People don't spend money to fix their places up. We've lost a lot of people over here because they don't know what the heck is going to happen."

Fire destroyed 12 rowhouses, most of them vacant, in that part of the neighborhood in January 2007. Residents consistently pressure the city's Bureau of Building Inspection to demolish abandoned homes there, and Mr. Shields was there Tuesday with BBI inspecting them.

"If [city government] is not working for the neighborhood, it's not likely the neighborhood will work for itself," the councilman said.

The neighborhood has done some work for itself, including preserving a greenway that could become a new city park and starting community garden projects. Residents are well-schooled on the LTV redevelopment plans and largely support them -- which tends to surprise developers who remember the late '90s fights over the coke works.

"The thing about Hazelwood is, when you put a call out to the community, the community usually shows up," Mr. Smith, the outgoing chairman of the Hazelwood Initiative, said.

Residents supported a master plan for the LTV site years ago that called for a mass transit link between the site and Oakland. Bus traffic between the two is sketchy and there are no simple, direct road links between the adjacent neighborhoods either.

Mr. Widdoes at RIDC favors converting a commercial freight rail line running from Hazelwood to Oakland and Lawrenceville for commuter use -- something which councilman William Peduto, working separately, has also proposed.

If that worked, it would be yet another way of trying to save Hazelwood using links to its industrial past.

"People in Oakland have said since day one, unless there is a more relative means of access from Oakland to Hazelwood, other than Bates Street, they can't see their way" to join in the redevelopment, Mr. Widdoes said.

"Boy, [commuter rail] would be nice to all get behind. It's tough to see a negative. There is too much going on in Oakland and Lawrenceville and potentially Hazelwood. No place has more potential than Hazelwood."