PROVIDENCE — When Jessica Vega was a teenager, growing up on Amherst Street in Olneyville, her mother had a strict rule.

Don’t walk on Manton Avenue and don’t cross over to the area south of Manton.

Vega recalled yesterday that her mother used to say, “You can get kidnapped. You can get shot. There’s a lot of bad people there.”

But her mother’s rule no longer applies, police officials and civic leaders rejoiced yesterday. They gathered at the new Riverside Park yesterday morning to celebrate the revitalization of Olneyville in the vicinity of Aleppo, Pelham, Bosworth and Curtis streets and Manton Avenue.

With them was Vega, who now serves as an outreach worker under the federal Americorps program for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national nonprofit group that has served as one of the catalysts for the revitalization, and the Olneyville Housing Corporation.

The MetLife Foundation, which recognizes partnerships between community development groups and police departments that have reduced crime and otherwise improved low- to moderate-income communities, presented plaques and a joint award of $25,000 to Olneyville Housing Corporation and the Police Department for their successes in Olneyville.

The foundation also gave the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence a plaque and a $15,000 award for its citywide work on gang prevention and youth safety.

Olneyville Housing and the police were the winners of one of two first-place awards available nationally, competing among 400 applicants. The institute, acclaimed for its streetworker program, won in a brand-new special category.

For four or five years, “you saw a neighborhood that was all but forgotten,” Frank Shea, executive director of Olneyville Housing, told the audience at the award ceremony. “If it wasn’t for drugs and prostitution, there really wasn’t any reason to be on Aleppo Street at all.”

What City Councilwoman Josephine DiRuzzo, a cofounder of Olneyville Housing in 1988, and others recalled as a lively Polish neighborhood with thriving mills, such as Highland Textiles and Rau Findings, had collapsed in despair.

There was a strong campaign under way in the 1990s for the development of the Woonasquatucket Greenway along the river, Shea recalled later, and Olneyville Housing wanted to be involved. Nearby vacant lots and derelict or mismanaged multifamily houses made the immediate area a crime zone, however.

If the greenway, including the nine-acre Riverside Park, was going to succeed, there would have to be a comprehensive redevelopment effort.

“We said we’ll have this beautiful park, but nobody is going to feel safe coming here,” Shea recalled. Responsible residents — “eyes on the park,” as the award application put it — had to be moved in who would cooperate with the police and the city Parks Department..

Olneyville Housing, with the help of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and others, set out to acquire and rehabilitate problem real estate and to enlist the help of the police. In a resulting grand partnership, 51 units of affordable housing and two storefronts were built and crime was slashed by 70 percent around the targeted properties.

Olneyville Housing made some straight land purchases, the city contributed some land and abated taxes and liens on certain problem properties, and the police and the attorney general’s Nuisance Task Force collaborated to pressure negligent owners of dilapidated property to sell out. In one of those crime-ridden properties, for example, a murder had occurred.

In other steps:

•Lt. Robert Lepre, commander of the local police district, and Sgt. Patrick Reddy saw to it that an area known as “the cave” that was a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes was made unusable. “The cave” was a hidden spot between the old and new foundations of a casket warehouse. They had a worker building the park use his front-end loader to drop a boulder into place that served to block access to “the cave.”

“Once we did that, the fun was over,” Lepre said.

•The partners applied the concept of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and had a preliminary design for the park tweaked to make it less hospitable to potential wrongdoers. For example, thorn bushes were planted thickly along a retaining wall on the riverbank to discourage criminals from lurking there.

•The city reversed its abandonment of a portion of Aleppo in order to have that stretch paved and to serve as frontage for new houses as well as a vantage point for police patrols to look out over the park.

•Park construction was jump-started due to two large-scale volunteer work days — James W. Rouse Community Service Days — sponsored by the company Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse, of Baltimore, which has been redeveloping large swaths of the Valley and Olneyville neighborhoods.

In addition to the park, passersby can now see two Olneyville Housing undertakings: Riverside Gateway, a $6.8-million project that produced 31 affordable rental units and two storefronts, on Aleppo, Pelham, Curtis and Manton, and Riverside Townhomes, a $4-million development of 21 affordable houses for first-time buyers on a former brownfield, on Aleppo, Curtis and Bosworth. The development was financed by bank loans and a variety of government aid.

“They’ve got waiting lists now of people who want to come and live here,” said Barbara Fields, executive director of the Rhode Island office of Local Initiatives Support Corporation. “They’re fighting over those units that face the park.”

“There’s probably not another neighborhood in Providence in which the transformation has occurred [to the extent] that has occurred in Olneyville,” Mayor David N. Cicilline declared at the ceremony. On hand was a smattering of dignitaries, including U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who as Rhode Island attorney general created the first nuisance task force, and City Councilman Michael Solomon, former board chairman of Olneyville Housing.

Said Fields, “I think we need to take a moment to appreciate the wow of what has happened in this community.”

Vega, 26, now has no qualms about crossing to “the other side” of Manton, going to the park and to work at the housing corporation office at 1 Curtis.

“It’s really great that it turned out this way,” she said. “Now, at least I can come with my kids and actually enjoy it, and say, hey, look, it’s changed. … It’s getting much better.”

gsmith@projo.com