WE ARE SURROUNDED BY GLOOMY news about the economy. In Rhode Island, people of talent and energy are beating down the exit doors, while people of little talent and energy are entering surreptitiously. Or so it might seem.

Providence has hired a consultant from Washington to reposition the image of the capital so that corporate chieftains will come here and college graduates will stay. What about the people who should stay away? The new consultant says the city must market itself better. Maybe so. A good message cannot hurt. But people should get out onto the streets and see what’s really happening in the city.

I did recently. The city was humming. Its motto was once “The Beehive of Industry.” With the departure long ago of the textile, jewelry and machinery manufactories that gave rise to the motto, Industry with a capital I is gone, but industry with a little i remains: the energy of individual enterprise.

A lot of this industrious enterprise may be found in the little main streets of neighborhoods around the city. My guide was the Neighborhood Markets Web site, sponsored by the Providence Economic Development Partnership and the Department of Planning and Development. The site’s goal is to spread the word of these buzzing centers of community. To visit, go to www.providenceri.com\nm.

The site identifies seven neighborhood market districts: Atwells Avenue, Broad Street, Chalkstone Avenue, Charles Street, Cranston Street, Olneyville Square and Wickenden & Ives. These shopping areas want to broaden their customer base, but they still rely on locals for most of their patronage.

All, that is, except for Atwells Avenue, whose fine restaurants dazzle most visitors into overlooking its impressive collection of distinctive and often homey little shops. Federal Hill isn’t just about Italian restaurants anymore, or even Italo-Americans. The old Italo-American Club building hosts an Asian restaurant these days, since the club itself moved to an old funeral home several years ago.

The Atwells Avenue icon on the Neighborhood Markets Web site links to an introductory page that itself links to a fancy site ( www.providencefederalhill.com) where a pretty girl points you to the variety of offerings on Federal Hill. The merchants of Broad, Chalkstone, Charles, Cranston, Olneyville and Ives are at work on their own links to the Neighborhood Markets site. This temporary Internet gap may reflect a gap in organizational sophistication but not in entrepreneurial energy or industry. Indeed, there may be more vacant shopfronts, block for block, on and near glamorous Westminster Street downtown than in the shopping districts on the Neighborhood Markets Web site.

Those blocks are lined with goods and services, jobs and profit. The condition of these areas two decades ago was far different. Back then, a friend hectored me with a running count of “For Sale” signs in the yards of middle- and working-class neighborhoods, foretelling the doom of the city. In a column on July 22, 1992, called “A tale of two cities,” I wrote: “In Mount Pleasant, people talk of Chalkstone Avenue and Smith Street as if they were trenches at some latter-day Verdun, abandoned grudgingly as block after block grows meaner and meaner in a losing battle for residential civility.”

Gloom and doom have by now abandoned neighborhood after neighborhood. South Providence and other neighborhoods have seen much renovation of old houses and new affordable housing. Development, micro-investment and the hint of prosperity have even come to Olneyville, where the levers of progress are misconstrued by some of its community activists. Change seems to bring an anxiety that most deeply affects those with the most active imaginations, who turn out to be, in practice, deeply conservative (in the troglodytic sense).

Today, “For Sale” signs are again popping up in front yards all around town, and the persistence of graffiti and gang murder drags down the pace of progress. But nothing resembling the plight of the city’s neighborhoods a decade and more ago can be seen on the horizon today. Quite the reverse.

Politics at the national level explains some of this. The replacement of the handout with the hand up under Republican and Democratic administrations nationally since 1981 has worked wonders. Prosperity has helped philosophy trickle down to the state and local levels, with entrepreneurship, family, individual freedom and personal responsibility having largely if not wholly replaced welfare and grievance as the dominant models of social mobility.

Traveling up and down the streets of Providence, and especially the little main streets identified by the Neighborhood Markets site, one notices that a lot of the shops are run by immigrants. Most of them have avoided entrapment in yesterday’s failed models of social mobility. Without apologizing for others who are here illegally, our civic marketeers must not overlook the buzz of immigration’s energy.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com)