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Norristown tries to fight decay, not itself.

Is it poised for a rebirth? The distressed borough is ripe for a resurgence if it can learn to stop fighting itself.

Developer J. Brian O'Neill has a tip: "If you have any money, buy a house in Norristown. It will be the best investment you ever made. "

Nearly everything about the ragged Montgomery County seat argues against that. On the region's list of good towns gone bad, few better fit the label "distressed" - or have had a harder time shedding it - than Norristown.

Among its 31,000 residents, unemployment is almost 50 percent above the county average and per capita income more than 40 percent below. Its overall crime rate is higher than Philadelphia's.

Within its 3.2 square miles are at least nine shelters, five drug treatment clinics, and 1,350 Section 8 rental units.

To avoid bankruptcy, fractious Borough Hall has had to take out a $4 million loan and open its books to the state. Any week now, it will raise the property tax rate - already one of the highest in the county - by 60 percent.

Yet Norristown suddenly is a hot table in the high-stakes gamble on old-town revitalization. With at least 19 renewal plans drafted and ditched since 1965, can the third-largest community on the Schuylkill finally be remade?

"Bet on it," says O'Neill, who already has.

A major redeveloper of industrial boneyards, he has put $18 million into a $500 million dreamscape triple the size of the Conshohocken Miracle four miles downriver. His plan would, over 10 years, transform 365 decaying waterfront and downtown acres into a high-end colony of residential and office towers, with a hotel, restaurants, shops, a multiplex and a minor-league ballpark.

O'Neill is not the only one flouting the odds.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is in, for $1.9 million a year through 2024. Next month, construction should be done on its rented regional headquarters, a grass-roofed marvel of "green" futurity - and the first new office building on Main Street in nearly a century.

Dewey Commercial Investors has sunk $30 million into a luxury development of 306 apartments and 32 townhouses on the eastern edge - the largest residential project in the borough in at least three decades.

And there is Timothy Hawkesworth, who is seeking a different sort of renaissance. A critically acclaimed painter, he bought an abandoned costume factory along the river for $110,000 and has spent $200,000 converting it into an arts center, with 17 studios, a gallery and classrooms.

Norristown, he says with a mostly straight face, is his "Florence on the Schuylkill. "

What is stoking their confidence? For one thing, the arrival of a rescue squad of state lawmakers and county officials intent on resuscitating the borough. Among them are Jerry Nugent, the renewal expert credited with doing the same for the Conshohockens, and Paul Bartle, Montgomery County Redevelopment Authority chairman.

"When I tell people I have my penthouse suite on the Schuylkill River" in Norristown, Bartle says, "the naysayers won't be naysayers anymore. "

If that day ever comes, it will be because the borough did something it resisted through decades of inexorable decline.

It accepted help.

*

To understand Norristown's potential, O'Neill says, you must see it "from the air. "

As gritty streets recede, location snaps into focus. The city below is the hole in a rich doughnut of such choice ingredients as Lower Merion Township, King of Prussia, and Plymouth Meeting, in turn set in the center of one of the state's wealthiest counties. The Pennsylvania Turnpike nearly sideswipes Norristown on the south; another major artery, Route 202, transects it.

Close to its heart is a transit hub for the R6 regional rail line from Center City, the Route 100 high-speed line from 69th Street via the Main Line, and seven SEPTA bus routes. Running right through the parking lot is the Schuylkill River Trail, which runs from the Philadelphia Art Museum to Valley Forge and is biked, walked and skated by nearly 400,000 people a year.

The location "invites investment," said Nugent, now the county redevelopment director. "It's a textbook place for revitalization. "

To make Norristown more commuter-accessible, Montgomery County is pressing a receptive PennDot and the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission for a slip ramp leading downtown. U.S. Rep. Joseph Hoeffel already has delivered a $10 million federal transportation grant to his county for the estimated $100 million project, including improvements to connecting roads.

With environmental approvals expected by February and land acquisition likely to take at least two years, construction could begin by 2007.

The interchange would do for Norristown what the Blue Route link did for the Conshys, says Leo Bagley, the county's chief transportation planner.

It "will really seal the deal" on redevelopment, he said. "Then it's a matter of the market taking over, and people recognizing there's money to be made."

*

To understand Norristown's problems, you must see the borough as David Sereny does daily - from the ground.

With his shaved head, goatee and earrings, Sereny, 41, lacks the polish of the deep-pocket developers. Yet he's a player.

Having watched the commercial rebirth of Conshohocken and the retail metamorphosis of Manayunk, he sensed opportunity in the same Norristown neighborhoods that his father once walked as a beat cop.

An electrical engineer by training, Sereny began dabbling in Norristown real estate in the late 1980s and by 1999 had 37 properties. At first, he rented to Section 8 tenants, but no more. As his holdings have grown to 80 homes and apartments and his investment to $4 million, he has catered to the booming population of Mexican immigrants - a group he believes is bringing new life to the borough.

Day and night, he patrols the narrow streets in a burgundy Hummer, slowing down to glare at any shady characters standing too near his properties.

"Anything you want to do in Norristown, you have to do yourself. Anything you want to change, you have to change yourself," he said. "Which is what I'm doing. "

Sereny's vigilance kicks up a couple of notches on West Marshall Street, an off-Main retail district with a back-alley business in drugs and flesh.

In the middle of it is Sereny's office, where nine state-of-the-art cameras surveil his block around the clock. Part bunker, part executive suite, it has remote-entry doors and bulletproof glass that "can take shots from an Uzi," he said.

The panic-room accoutrements belie his faith in Norristown's future.

"It's like all the other small towns in the state that have hit bottom - the only way they can go is up," he said. "If I can turn some buildings around myself, I believe I can get some other investors to follow my lead. "

Sereny works his it-can't-get-worse optimism on the West Marshall Street Merchants Association, of which he is president. Representing about 30 small businesses - a thrift shop, spice store, and dog-grooming service among them - the members have spent the last year on a crusade to reclaim their patch of Norristown and draw shoppers to it.

"We are in control of the destiny of this area," Sereny said. "It's almost like annexation. "

The board meets weekly at Coffee Talk, a cafe into which Joel and Aleksandra Eigen poured every cent seven years ago. They came to Norristown by way of Poland, Austria, Israel and, most recently, the leafy suburb of East Norriton, where "we had the American dream - a cul-de-sac, a swimming pool! " Aleksandra said.

"After a year, we knew was not for us. We are not the suburban people. "

At a meeting earlier this year, there was talk of pumpkin-painting contests, neon-green anticrime flyers, and new trash cans. For a moment, energy was in the air. Then suddenly it wasn't.

"Who cares about litter on the ground when people are getting murdered in the street?" asked one board member, rolling his eyes at the mention of garbage bins.

One shop owner recounted the day a young man ran into his convenience store with the police on his heels.

"Suddenly I got 10 cops in my store, throwing down some guy," Dave Levin said. "They got guns out. You know, that's not real good for business. "

Levin, who was thinking about joining the group, left the cafe early, doubtful that they could make headway against seemingly intractable problems.

Sereny watched him go and shook his head.

"A lot of these people are really beaten down," he said. "It's been bad for a long, long time."

*

Forty years, give or take.

Even into the 1950s, Norristown was proud and prosperous. Its West End was a small-scale Main Line, with grand Victorians for well-to-do physicians and bankers and for the lawyers who plied their trade at the Napoleon LeBrun-designed Greek Revival courthouse. Hotels, theaters and the county's best shopping beckoned visitors downtown.

The rowhouse neighborhoods were dominated by a historically large African American community and by European immigrants - Irish, Austrians, Germans and especially Italians, nearly all of whom hailed from two towns, Sciacca in Sicily and Montella, near Naples. They kept the economy humming as stonemasons, shop clerks and laborers in Norristown's many textile mills and light-manufacturing plants.

The beginnings of decline were barely noticed in the post-war hubbub over newborn suburbia. The middle-and-up classes, and the businesses that served them, drained towns that suddenly had the musty taint of cultural relics. For-sale signs on Norristown's big homes drew speculators who snapped them up and carved them into apartments, providing a base equation for decay: absentee landlords and renters.

During the '60s, the mall whammy settled over Main Street. Shops that fell vacant filled slowly, and usually with low-end merchants where exclusive retail had once been. Suburbanites who visited typically had no choice, forced to the Montgomery County Courthouse by jury duty.

Norristown's manufacturing backbone was crumbling, too. While the huge Conshohocken plants pink-slipped thousands amid public hand-wringing, the small mills upriver laid off their workers a few dozen at a pop.

"It was just a lot of little drips," said Judith Memberg, director of the nonprofit Genesis Housing Corp. and the borough's former planning director. "A very gradual decline, which made it difficult to see. "

By the end of the '70s, though, Norristown's woes were glaring. That decade, the small cuts at the factories bled the borough of nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs. The population dropped 9 percent, and nearly all of the 3,500 who left were white.

Nothing more personified the new Norristown, however, than the impoverished former psychiatric patients crowding downtown stoops and benches. Between 1968 and 1974, more than 1,500 were released from Norristown State Hospital in the national movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill.

"Norristown was the only home they knew," said Mayor Ted LeBlanc, "so they stayed. "

No one knows how many remain today, but enough to make the library look sometimes "like the airport terminal - so many people there carrying around all this luggage," said Paula Robinson, 54, a nurse, fourth-generation Norristonian, and longtime community activist.

Many wound up in unregulated group homes. Some found federally subsidized housing under the Section 8 program, which became available in Montgomery County in 1976.

In theory, rental units for low-income tenants were to be spread equitably around the county, but in reality they never were. Norristown had more willing landlords, lower rents, and a larger poverty population - not to mention the county's Section 8 office.

"You're naturally going to have a lot of people drop by," said Ron Jackson, executive director of the Montgomery County Housing Authority, which runs the program.

Norristown quickly cornered more than half of the county Section 8 market, leaping from 50 to 500 units in five years.

The presence of so many poor drew more aid agencies. They, in turn, drew more poor.

"Everyone who needs help should get help," LeBlanc said. "But do they all need to get it in Norristown? "

Today, between government buildings and nonprofits, nearly one-quarter of property in Norristown - $200 million worth - is tax-exempt. The annual revenue loss to the borough and the 6,500-student Norristown Area School District totals $5 million.

Even among taxable properties, about 15 percent are in arrears in any given year, the worst rate in the county.

The mayor himself was recently a tax delinquent.

Calling it a testament to his confidence in Norristown's future, LeBlanc bought a Main Street bar, Morley's Pub, in 2000 and spent $600,000 renovating it. But the remodel, he says, stretched him too thin to cover his 2002 tax bill of about $5,000, forcing the county to place a lien on the bar. The mayor paid up in September.

To Robinson, an activist through five mayoral administrations, it all plays into not only Norristown's fiscal slide, but also a psychological one. She calls it the "TAP" effect: "First we tolerated it. Then we accepted it. Now we're participating in it."*The beautification committee decided that flowers would spruce up the borough's image. But there were disagreements over the kinds of flowers and who would plant the seeds.

"Some people did the work," said Payson Burt, the group's coordinator. "But they found out that others weren't. So they quit working."

*

So far: purchased 10 parcels, totaling a half-mile of riverfront, and a historic Main Street bank building. With about 1,000 small tracts in the 365-acre redevelopment zone - whose asking prices were hiked, O'Neill said, by owners "who believe they should be paid a supreme premium" - he has a long way to go.

The Conshys "had enormous factories on sprawling pieces of ground," said O'Neill, who owns 50 of the last open acres there. Even so, "it took close to 20 years" to assemble what is now the 120-acre office corridor.

If anyone knows the long labor of town rebirth, it is Jerry Nugent. Norristown today, he says, is where Conshohocken was in 1983, when the first small office building came out of the ground - and when it took a crazy leap of faith to believe much more could follow.

To the cold eye, there are many reasons to think it can't in Norristown, he acknowledges.

They are as concrete as the riverside sewage plant that has to be moved, at a projected cost of $26 million.

They are as deep as the line of applicants for subsidized housing, or the pool of red ink washing around Borough Hall.

And they are as abstruse as the economy, which has kept millions of square feet of office space empty throughout the near suburbs and the investment community skittish.

Given its problems, "Norristown will score runs in the early years by hitting singles," not homers, Nugent said. "I think it will be quite different a decade from now, significantly different 20 years from now. "

Meanwhile, "people are going to have to be patient. "