A bridge on Sayles Street crosses the Blackstone River toward the center of the city.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

First-time visitors to Constitution Hill in Woonsocket on a sunny fall afternoon might notice young mothers walking with children in strollers on quiet streets marked by well-kept houses and white picket fences.

At the very top of the hill is the Hope Street Childcare Center, a handsome, red-brick former schoolhouse. Across the street from the center is a playground named for Stan “the Bulldog” Eason, a neighborhood activist.

But things didn’t always look so idyllic in this neighborhood that borders downtown Woonsocket and the Blackstone River.

“It used to be kind of a scary place,” Margaux Morriseau, director of community building for Neighborworks Blackstone River Valley, said of the inner-city neighborhood. The Constitution Hill of today is the result of more than 20 years of work by scores of activists, residents, and public and private groups.

According to Joe Garlick, executive director of Neighborworks, the agency, then known as Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation, which was founded in 1987, took ownership of abandoned houses in Constitution Hill following the state’s credit-union crisis in the 1980s.

In 1990, the Glenark Mill, a Civil War-era textile mill on the banks of the Blackstone River, reopened as 67 units of affordable housing more than three years after an arsonist set a fire in the building.

Garlick said Neighborworks owns 28 houses scattered throughout the neighborhood, and they are used as affordable rentals. Four of the rentals were built to be rented by tenants who provide home-based child care, a “critical service” in the neighborhood, according to Morriseau. “About 85 percent of our residents are working families,” she said. The group has also renovated older houses or built new housing and sold units to first-time homebuyers.

The Chaplin-Perez Center, which opened in 1999, includes apartments and a community center, and was named for activisits Jim Chaplin and C. Gil Perez.

The neighborhood’s array of support services, from after-school care to arts programs to 200 units of affordable housing, is the result of a coordinated program of comprehensive community development focused on Constitution Hill, according to Barbara Fields, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Corp. of Rhode Island.

Just last year, the renovation of the Hope Street Childcare Center, seen as the crowning achievement of the neighborhood’s revival, won an award from the Providence Preservation Society. The former Hope Street School, built in 1899, was closed in 1978 and had remained vacant for decades.

Garlick said the neighborhood has been touched by the foreclosure crisis, but thanks to homebuyer education programs for first-time buyers, “there are only a few vacant and foreclosed properties” in Constitution Hill. And Neighborworks is working to buy these abandoned properties and reuse them once again as affordable housing.

Neighborworks also has a plan for a small abandoned mill building on Northeast Street, bordering the Blackstone River. Morriseau said the building will be turned into apartments for teachers who work in after-school programs in the neighborhood, “people who want to live and work in the community.” The building renovation is expected to cost $1.1 million. Morriseau said it is hoped that landscaping of the riverfront on Northeast Street can be improved so the area can be made “more accessible” to the neighborhood.

cdunn@projo.com