On June 30, Alan Manoian, City of Auburn economic development specialist, led a group of several dozen enthusiastic people (myself included) on an early evening guided walking tour of New Auburn’s center, starting at Rolly’s Diner. The tour had important implications beyond entertainment. Hopefully it was a step towards New Auburn’s renaissance.

Manoian recounted the history of the neighborhood, starting in the early 1870s when private developers converted a heavily forested area of about 300 acres at the confluence of the Androscoggin and Little Androscoggin Rivers into a planned textile-manufacturing village, using water power from the fast-flowing Little Androscoggin, immigrant laborers recruited from Britain and 2.5 million in locally made bricks to build and operate Barker’s Mill (now Barker Mill Arms, an Auburn Housing Authority subsidized apartment complex).

The original developers platted New Auburn into grids, selling lots for houses, stores and churches. In the process, they created a physically attractive and intimate community, which enabled residents, consisting mainly of successive waves of Irish Catholic, French Canadian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, to live, work, worship, study and socialize, all within easy walking distance.

The New Auburn tour was one of several that the enthusiastic Manoian, a native of Lowell, Mass., has conducted in various parts of downtown since being hired by the city over two years ago. His goal: to raise local excitement about reimagining and remaking Auburn’s urban core into an area that is both more livable and prosperous. It’s an exciting journey that has been successfully undertaken by other struggling historic New England cities, Manoian’s hometown of Lowell being one of the most noteworthy examples.

Reinventing a cityscape is a process that marries sophisticated urban planning to a locale’s existing historic, architectural and geographic resources. It’s also one that rides the wave of increasing demographic trends favoring urban over suburban living. At first glance though, New Auburn doesn’t seem a likely candidate.

A lot of local residents see New Auburn not as an urban center but as a transit point to get to and from other parts of Auburn as well as Lewiston, Durham, Freeport, Brunswick, etc. That’s not surprising, since the configuration and dimensions of its heavily traveled arteries — Main Street Bridge, Lown Peace Bridge, South Main, Broad and Mill Streets, and Riverside Drive – encourage motorists to cut through New Auburn, not to stop and shop, walk its streets or visit its greenspaces.

This isn’t just the fault of road and bridge builders. A disastrous 1933 fire leveled 248 buildings at the center of New Auburn, and the area never fully recovered. Many ornate, multi-story, late-19th and early-20th century structures were destroyed, and, as Manoian points out, these were not replaced with anything of comparable quality or stature because of changing architectural tastes and lack of financial resources during the Great Depression.

Yet, as urban planners like to say, New Auburn has good “bones.” A number of attractive older commercial blocks, re-purposed factories, gracious homes, triple-decker tenements and even a former Art-Deco movie theater are still standing. And, of course, there’s the soaring St. Louis Church building.

Just as important is the local spirit d’corps, embodied by the United New Auburn Association, an organization which hosts community meetings and events.

The New Auburn Village Center Study, a consulting report for the city completed in August 2014, contains recommendations for redeveloping 18 acres of the area’s core. These include redesigning intersections to focus on “local placemaking and the pedestrian environment versus accommodating pass-through traffic;” relocating Lown Bridge to the Mill Street/Riverside Drive intersection; making a river esplanade overlooking Little Andy Park; continuing the park to a new civic space, “Broad Street Plaza,” at the present Lown Bridge location; building a river walk between the Androscoggin Block buildings and Androscoggin River, and creating “vibrant and safe streetscapes with wide sidewalks, street trees, pedestrian-scaled lighting, bike racks and other amenities.”

The first step towards realizing such a plan is to garner public support for the changes it will entail, and Manoian’s tours are part of the educational and public relations effort to achieve that.

However, political courage and determination on the part of mayor and council will be needed to support the follow-on measures vital to catalyzing development, including modification of zoning and building standards, altering transportation routes, and authorizing substantial funding for new public infrastructure.

Political will for this kind of endeavor is usually in short supply, particularly at the municipal level, where the discontent of constituents and taxpayers is just a phone call or face-to-face confrontation away. The last time Auburn’s city government showed concerted commitment for an extreme makeover was when Mayor Lee Young and the City Council backed the ADAPT plan in 1998. ADAPT led to construction of a new City Building at the site of Auburn Hall, the Hilton Garden Inn, an expansion of the Auburn Public Library, Festival Plaza, and a greenway at Great Falls Plaza.

Tours are enjoyable. Talk is cheap. Changing the cityscape of New Auburn and other parts of Auburn’s urban core is a worthwhile goal but attaining it will probably be neither enjoyable nor cheap.

Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is the founder of Museum L-A and author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be reached at epsteinel@yahoo.com.