A year ago, Duane Hill went Downtown from his home on Sheffield Street to ask the Historic Review Commission for more time. A demolition of the property adjacent to his Manchester home was pending.

He had bought the property 10 years before and was renovating as he could. The commission gave him an extension, and today, the brick building is spruced up and ready for its historic front door.

Mr. Hill's outcome is "a perfect example of what we want," said Jerome Jackson, associate director of the Manchester Citizens Corporation. "We are asking the city to give us time."

At an emergency meeting of the Manchester Citizens Corporation last week, Mr. Jackson said demolition "can't be the only plan for Manchester. Just like 40 years ago," when a clutch of residents and preservationists stopped the city from bulldozing it, "we are still worth saving."

"Without historic designation," said board member Patricia Washington, "there might not even be a Manchester."

At nearly every session of the Historic Review Commission, Manchester properties flow down one page of the agenda. The city is invariably the petitioner, the recommendation nearly always the same: demolition.

Thirty years ago, Manchester became this city's second oldest historic district, after the Mexican War Streets. Liverpool Street between Fulton and Manhattan streets is as intact and grand as it was more than 100 years ago. The neighborhood is scattered with mansions and working-class period architecture that rival any in the city. It also is scattered with jarring blight.

The same story haunts almost every predominately black neighborhood in the city. Populations withered, houses went derelict and the market stopped driving investment. The biggest chunks of funding, public money, has become a drying reservoir for which competition is fierce.

Mr. Jackson said the neighborhood has raised many millions over the years to buy and restore now-productive homes "and there is no reason why we can't raise more. We are asking the city to give us the time to build a plan, to look at what we can do. That way, if houses have to come down, we'll have a plan for what to put in their place."

The neighborhood group has asked its membership to help update a 2005 report so the intention of residents can counter the city's current demolition option for 84 properties. The group identified 194 vacant homes and lots in the 2005 report. It proposed restoring 100 and demolishing 20. Today, conditions have almost flipped the proportions.

Yarone Zober of the mayor's office sent a letter to the organization last week suggesting that a "piecemeal approach will not serve anybody well. What is the status of MCC's broader redevelopment plan?"

Manchester's challenge is being strapped for the funds it needs to update its 2005 housing-stock inventory. The organization will have to take out a loan for $300,000 to add to the $1.5 million it has raised to restore six properties in a HUD portfolio of developer Ralph Falbo and a seventh it owns.

Earlier this month, the Historic Review Commission approved demolishing six homes on Franklin Street but gave four on Sedgwick Street a reprieve. Those four "look like the worst of the worst," said commission chair Michael Stern.

No one in Manchester lauds the Sedgwick structures except that they are four in a row across from a vacant corner and perpendicular to a row slated for demolition.

"We don't want any more huge vacant lots," said Mr. Jackson. "We need something to build from. When you say historic, what that means is old. Historic status is a selling point, a reason a lot of people have moved here."

Several residents relatively new to the neighborhood -- who asked not to be named -- said they would prefer vacant lots because vacant houses breed rodents and criminal mischief. Mr. Jackson said vacant lots also become nuisance areas. He said they should be a last-resort option because too many of them create psychological and emotional voids.

"Trading a building for a vacant lot does not improve our neighborhood," Mr. Jackson said. "Before people moved here and put a lot of money into their properties, it was poor people who fought to save this neighborhood. If they stuck it out here because it was worth saving then, it's worth saving now."

Stanley Lowe, a founding member of the citizens group and former board member, implored the commission last month to work with the neighborhood to find funding to turn Manchester back toward a market-driven neighborhood.

"Month after month we come here, and its five there, 10 there, eight there," he told the commission. "I'm close to the belief that we are going to lose the architectural fabric of Manchester."

At the neighborhood meeting last week, he admitted that keeping ahead of deterioration requires money that's hard to raise.

The group has raised money through public-private partnerships over the years to build houses on vacant lots and restore old ones; it was one of the first recipients of federal Hope VI money to build scattered-site affordable homes.