The North Side Community Development Fund has been awarded $4 million in federal tax credits, an allocation director Mark Masterson said clears "a huge hurdle" toward the $12 million needed to rehabilitate five buildings in the Federal-North redevelopment plan.

The fund, an arm of the Northside Leadership Conference, applied for the tax credits in February along with 249 entities and was one of 99 favored.

The $4 million in tax credits is the largest amount received by the funds, which has won tax credits three out of four tries over five years, said Mr. Masterson. The fund issues tax credits as enticements to developers who can write off a portion of development costs on federal taxes.

"We have time constraints to sell them," about two years, he said, "and another $7 million or $8 million is needed for the whole project."

The Northside Leadership Conference and the Central Northside Neighborhood Council are working together from a multi-faceted plan the neighborhood has devised, with the Garden Theater block as a category unto itself.

"The options are being whittled down" for reuse of the former porn theater, the former Masonic Hall, the Bradbury apartment building behind it and two buildings east of the Garden on North Avenue.

He said some ideas include a boutique hotel, a restaurant combined with a theater, "maybe a brewpub franchise."

Mark Fatla, executive director of the leadership conference, said there will be a lot of work to do to get the project started.

"The Garden is not going to be easy," he said. "It will be the most expensive piece of the whole project."

Besides those five properties, four others are being developed by Jim Aiello, two on North and two adjacent on Federal. The plan calls for first-floor retail, including a Fifth Third Bank, with apartments above and may be under construction as early as spring.

Bill Barron is developing a property on the other corner of Federal and North, and it will open as a Crazy Mocha coffee shop by the end of the year.

Mr. Fatla said the option "we will seriously explore" for the Garden is a theater-brewpub along the lines of the historic Bagdad Theater in Portland, Ore., a 1930s Moorish-style "architectural fantasy," he said.

"They took out every other row of seats and replaced them with posts and planks to create tables," he said. "They show second-run movies and [besides popcorn and other movie fare] they sell gourmet pizza and microbrews. Our market analysts identified over 20 such operations in the country."

The conference and the Central Northside Neighborhood Council will recruit businesses and market the Federal-North project.

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