But Van Dyke said making a community an art center is "a slow building process."
"I don't think it will be successful overnight," she said. "Art and galleries need to build a following and a reputation and do a lot of outreach. It's not quite the same as a grocery store, where you can go in and put a coupon in the paper for a free pound of butter and people will come visit you."
City officials said the report is a vision for how they want the street to look over the next decade or two and that a budget is not yet necessary. "People have expectations that all these things will happen tomorrow," Fogle said. "The idea is it's going to happen over time. And we do have limited resources."
Neighborhood leaders in Del Ray pointed out that the arts promotion strategy is already well established. More artists have moved into the area in recent years and the community's annual Art on the Avenue festival has been a huge success. When the festival began in 1995, about 2,500 people attended, said Pat Miller, the festival's chairwoman. Last year, she said, 40,000 to 45,000 people attended the one-day event, held on the first Saturday in October.
The festival's success is a key part of the revitalization that has been underway for the past decade on one of Alexandria's most historic streets.
As the development report describes, Mount Vernon Avenue has a "rich history." It began as a main thoroughfare connecting what were then the Del Ray and St. Elmo subdivisions in the late 19th century.
Fogle said the subdivisions were established to house workers from the nearby Potomac Yard, which until the 1980s was one of the major railroad switching stations on the East Coast. The area was incorporated as a separate town, called Potomac, and by 1925 had its own town hall and firehouse.
Alexandria annexed Potomac, which had included Mount Vernon Avenue, in 1930. The primarily residential avenue evolved into a major commercial street and an important regional route paralleling Route 1.
By the 1980s and early '90s, however, the area had become what Justin Wilson, president of the Del Ray Citizens Association, calls "a scary place." Residents say there was much more crime than there is today, and retail business was scattered.
Slattery, the head of the Del Ray Artisans, said she grew up in an adjacent neighborhood and "wasn't allowed in Del Ray when I was a kid."
When she moved into the area in the late 1980s, she recalled, "one of the first things I did was get a big dog."
Among the triggers for the current revitalization, residents say, were the art festival, the introduction of a farmers market in the mid-1990s and the opening in 1996 of St. Elmo's Coffee Pub -- on Mount Vernon Avenue.
"I was the first one who took the gamble," said St. Elmo's owner Nora Partlow, who displays artwork from local artists on the walls of the coffee shop. "Other people said, 'If she can do it, we can do it too.' The whole concept was to keep business on the avenue. We didn't want people to go to Arlington, or anyplace else."
More businesses, ranging from car dealerships to a cheese shop, opened. Property values rose rapidly.
The neighborhood plan, which is now incorporated into the city's master plan, seeks to build on these trends and encourage more development, but also limit it to small businesses.
To keep the area's residential character, city officials hope to make Mount Vernon Avenue more pedestrian-friendly by better lighting the sidewalks, adding more on-street parking and bike lanes, and cutting traffic flow from four lanes to two north of Commonwealth Avenue.
The report also calls for improving public transportation by adding DASH bus service in 2008 and trying to better connect the avenue to the Braddock Road Metro station.
Local business leaders and residents say they are happy with the plan. They say that the working group that prepared it encountered few major problems or controversies after coming together in the spring of 2003.
"It was a very amicable process all the way through," said Kevin Reilly, president of the Potomac West Business Association, a group of local businesses. "Everybody is looking to continue this momentum but at the same time retain the character of the avenue."
Wilson, the citizens association president, said the neighborhood has "come a long way."
"This is the next step," he said.
