Downtown Westerly, the commercial and residential district on the Pawcatuck River, is on the western edge of town, on the Connecticut border, but in every other sense it is the center of Westerly, the glue that holds the town's far-flung neighborhoods together.

Westerly has seven fire districts serving an even greater number of neighborhoods, including Avondale, Bradford, Dunn's Corners, Misquamicut, the North End, Potter Hill, Shelter Harbor, Watch Hill, White Rock, Winnapaug and Weekapaug.

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Outsiders are probably most familiar with the town's beach communities, including posh Watch Hill, which commands some of the highest real estate prices in the state.

But the downtown area is where much of the business of everyday life takes place in Westerly. It has the Town Hall, public library and YMCA. And although there are strip-mall developments on some of the larger roads in other sections of town, the downtown business district is surviving the retail competition and still has a grocery store, health food store, restaurants, clothing stores, a toy store, a surf shop, a cinema and an independent bookstore, among other offerings.

"It's this sort of fully functioning small town, that everything you need is here," said Emily Steffian, who, with her husband, Daniel Kamil, owns the Revival House Cinema & Cafe, on High Street. She said the in-town neighborhood is "an ideal place" for young families and older people who don't want to be isolated in 55-plus communities, because "you can walk everywhere."

The downtown "went though its period of being down in the dumps," Steffian said, but now, "people are reinvesting."

Downtown is also home to Wilcox Park, a 14-acre park and arboretum on Broad Street. "The park is just a stunning example of what towns should have," Steffian said. The Victorian-era park, designed in 1898 by Warren H. Manning, an associate of Frederick Law Olmstead, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Every summer it hosts an arts festival and Shakespeare in the Park productions. The Boston Pops usually perform there in the summer, attracting about 20,000 people.

Steffian, who is also an artist, said the library in Westerly is one of the best she has ever seen, and has a "beautiful" art gallery. The library functions as a public library but is administered by the same private association that manages Wilcox Park.

Town planner William Haase said a number of projects are in the works to revive some of the abandoned and decaying buildings in the downtown area, and to renovate some of the public spaces. A riverwalk project is among the plans.

"What is poised to happen in the very near future is so exciting," he said.

"The intent is to do a New Urbanism approach to infill redevelopment," Haase said, and to retain the historic character of the area with mixed-use developments. The town was first settled in 1669.

Haase said that Greenwich, Conn., developer Charles Royce, who is involved in the Ocean House project in Watch Hill, has acquired a large number of contiguous buildings along Westerly's Main Street. Currently, the buildings look as though they belong in "an auto-dependent commercial district," Haase said, but the plan is to create a walkable area with ground-floor retail spaces and residential units on the upper floors.

Harvey Perry, president of the Westerly Land Trust, has been working with Royce, Haase said.

Plans are also under way to renovate the old United Theater on Canal Street, a vaudeville-era movie house, and condominiums are planned at a building south of the railroad tracks that used to be an antique shop called Hidden Treasures, Haase said.

The administrators of the Wilcox Park and library are raising money for their own renovation project, he added.

Haase said the work is set to begin soon on phase one of the renovation of the Old Town Hall, a derelict building that was abandoned in the 1950s. The plan is to create museum and archival space there, he said.

The entire downtown area, and the surrounding residential neighborhoods, are historic districts, Haase said, which makes private homeowners eligible for historic tax credit programs and helps the town in applying for grants.

There is a wide variety of housing types and prices in Westerly. In the downtown area, the range for single-family houses is $239,900 for a two-bedroom ranch to $615,000 for a renovated Victorian house. In Westerly as a whole, the range is wider: from $175,000 for a two-bedroom Colonial in Bradford to $18,950,000 for a Watch Hill mansion.

"South of Route 1, houses tend to be more expensive," said Nadine DiPaola of Century 21 Anchor Associates. "Most of the people who grew up in town don't tend to buy near the beach."

Steffian said Westerly has more than "great restaurants" and "beaches that are incredible." She said the town has all the charms of small-town coastal life, but it's close to Providence, New London, Mystic and Stonington, and, a little farther away, Boston and New York. "You're not way out in the boonies," she said.

cdunn@projo.com / 277-7913

POPULATION: (Westerly, 2000): 22,966

MEDIAN SALES PRICE (Westerly, 2005): $335,000

PUBLIC SCHOOLS: Tower Street Elementary School (K to 5)

State Street School (K to 5)

Westerly Middle School (grades 6 to 8)

Westerly High School

INTERESTING FACT: The Chorus of Westerly, one of the few choruses in the United States that has children singing with adults, has its home base in an architectural beauty at 119 High St., the de-consecrated Church of the Immaculate Conception (1886), the first Roman Catholic church in Westerly.