Late last year, the city opened a one-stop payment center for people to pay tax bills, parking fines and the like in a vacant factory on 94th Avenue.

But industry flagged after World War II, leaving the largest factories and warehouses vacant for decades as smaller operations remained.

Located on the site of a vacant factory, the project was funded by $15 million in economic development assistance from federal and municipal agencies, as well as by private capital.

It is also spurring other development, Mr. Prunetti said, noting that a nearby vacant factory was being converted to a restaurant/nightclub.

Initially discouraged, Mr. Falcone soon heard about reasonably priced vacant factories in Haverill to the north.

A decade ago, a small band of poor but hardy artists moved into a vast, vacant factory on Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

A private investor also converted a vacant factory into a restaurant/nightclub called Katmandu.

Well, there were all those vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody called Mortgageville.

The postwar period saw Manchester in decline, with sooty vacant factories, squalid, crime-ridden slums and graceless 1960's structures replacing eccentricities that had outlived their usefulness.

In Dumbo, David Walentas reconfigured vacant factories and storage spaces to create housing.