The setting: a re-created Philadelphia

Peaches Ramos designated the telephone pole just around the corner of her street in Fairhill a no-pass zone: those who dealt drugs in this North Philly neighborhood were not welcome beyond it.

On a July afternoon, young men loitering on the corner go up to the pole, but, conspicuously, no further. And when Ms. Ramos walks by with her son Joshua, one yells out "Agua bomba!" - water bomb - normally a warning police are nearby.

Peaches - the name her grandfather gave her when she was a child - has been the block captain of her street for more than 10 years, organizing street clean-ups, getting the city to bulldoze abandoned buildings, and confronting the dealers. Despite her diminutive size, she walks confidently past the pole every day on her way to catch the No. 23 bus to Center City. There she works amid the convention bustle at a new beauty-supply store.

Many shops, hotels, and eateries have opened in Center City, in fact, and Philadelphia's sustained focus on attracting conventions and tourism has sparked an economic boom. It's made Ramos's routine very different from a decade ago.

In many ways, her life over the past 20 years provides a microcosm of Philadelphia at the end of the 20th century: She lost her job at a textile plant after it closed shop and moved away; she became a single mother, dependent on state assistance. She watched her neighborhood become devastated by drugs and war-zone-like violence. Now, she's a part of a new services and entertainment economy that so many big cities around the country are trying to promote - Philadelphia more than most.

Its experiment will help determine whether the City of Brotherly Love, once the manufacturing and political hub of the United States, can reinvent itself enough to step out of the omnipresent shadow of New York and cement a reputation as a world-class metropolis - as well as rehabilitate its depressed neighborhoods. The irony is that this city, cradled between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, was once the center of America, whose position alongside London and Rome seemed all but guaranteed.

There are signs of hope today, even in the outer neighborhoods, however fragile and tenuous they may be. Like Ramos, other residents also make their way into Center City, where Republicans will meet next week to anoint George W. Bush. After a new convention center opened downtown in 1993, drawing thousands of visitors to the city, new businesses began to spring up.

Once-magnificent office buildings that had been vacant for years were renovated, some made into opulent hotels. Historic Broad Street became an Avenue of the Arts, and the city has established seven new arts venues along its sidewalks- adding to established treasures such as the Philadelphia Museum and Lyric Opera company.

Students from around the country come to study at such institutions as the University of Pennsylvania, Villanova, and Temple - but Philly doesn't feel like a college town.

It's maintained its hardworking, industrial feel - and, unfortunately, its racial divide. Among the 50 largest cities in the US, only two others balance a similar slim white majority (51 percent) and large black minority (42 percent) - who often have different interests. In the 1999 election, for example, new Mayor John Street (D), who is black, won 94 percent of the black vote. Sam Katz, who is white, won 87 percent of the white vote. Last month, tensions were exacerbated by the police beating of a black suspect.

In neighborhoods like Fairhill and nearby Kensington, abandoned dwellings, empty factories, and other signs of urban blight are stark reminders of the city's mighty industrial past.

"A lot of Philadelphia neighborhoods were essentially company towns that were built around manufacturing plants that are no longer there," says David Thornburgh, executive director of Pennsylvania Economy League. "Those neighborhoods no longer serve as housing for local employees, and some of them have seen catastrophic population loss."

A faded, but glorious, past

Around the turn of the century, Philadelphia was hailed as one of the greatest and most diversified manufacturing cities in the world. In 1909, the city limits contained 211 of the 264 classes of industry as determined by the Bureau of the Census. It was the US leader in the production of textiles, locomotives and streetcars, sporting goods, and many other products. One industrialist called Kensington "a city within a city, filled to the brim with enterprise, dotted with factories so numerous that the rising smoke obscures the sky. A happy and contented people, enjoying a land of plenty."

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