This year marks the 50th anniversary of Milwaukee's open housing marches, which focused attention on a knot of persistent urban problems. This project is part of an ongoing series of stories, videos and other special features that will examine how far Milwaukee has come – and the work that remains to be done.

Dennis Walton remembers swimming in the new Calvin Moody indoor pool in the dead of winter.

Built in 1978, the 54,000-square-foot complex was a year-round gathering spot in what was then called Franklin Heights, on Milwaukee’s north side.

Journal Sentinel reporter John Schmid produced this special report through a Marquette University Law School fellowship established through the school's Sheldon B. Lubar Fund for Public Policy Research. The fellowship provides support for journalism projects on issues of civic importance. All the work was done under the direction of Journal Sentinel editors.

“It had a music system built into the pool so you could listen to the music underwater,” recalls Walton, 42, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood. “Beethoven. The local radio station. Everything.”

The pool was surrounded by middle-class bungalows and duplexes, all within walking distance of well over 10,000 manufacturing jobs. Walton’s parents belonged to an African-American community that found in Milwaukee a promised land of entry level opportunity. His mother worked at a meatpacking house, his father at the giant Pabst Brewing Co.

Then the industrial economy collapsed. Factories shuttered, leaving vast expanses of concrete, broken glass and barbed wire. By the late ’90s, city planners signed off on a new name for the neighborhood around the pool: Amani, which means “peace” in Swahili.

It was more prayerful than descriptive.

Bars covered windows; parents told children to stay indoors.

“When the jobs left, the drugs came in,” Walton says.

“The off-the-books economy is the survival economy,” said Robert Neuwirth, author of “Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.”

In 2002, the Milwaukee County parks system shuttered the 24-year-old Moody pool. The darkened building became a crime hub abutting Auer Avenue School, casting shadows over the children who went there.

Hopes rose briefly when a third building opened on the same block: a recreation center with big indoor basketball courts. But the Police Athletic League landed in bankruptcy court less than three years after it opened at a cost of $7.2 million — millions over budget. By 2005, Amani faced the prospect of two hulking lights-out edifices next to its grade school.

Today, more than half of Amani lives below the poverty line, making it one of the most extreme enclaves in one of America’s poorest cities. More than one in three residents is unemployed, nearly five times the rate in 1970. Nearly every block has boarded up and abandoned homes. The ZIP code it lands in — 53206 — led the city in homicides six of the past nine years of available data. Even after 10 years of effort, researchers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee failed to locate any other ZIP code in the nation with a matching per-capita share of residents who are or were incarcerated.

And yet Amani recently adopted a new role: It has become the test case of an emerging new strategy meant to put a floor under Milwaukee’s relentless downward spiral. New ambitions for the neighborhood amount to a wholesale rethinking of how to approach economic and social decline.

How it turns out could dictate the paths taken in other neighborhoods, and by other cities across the country.

A new approach

Unable for decades to move the needle in a positive direction, Milwaukee’s leading foundations and nonprofits quietly are abandoning many of the leftover conventions of the last century. They no longer pretend to cover the entire city. Rather than spread finite funds randomly across the region, they target a handful of strategic neighborhoods with a barrage of focused funding and clustered support.

The idea is that agencies, activists, nonprofits, foundations, even law enforcement — coordinating strategically for the first time — pile on together in hopes of reaching a critical mass, turning enough individual lives around that ultimately a whole neighborhood stabilizes, and hopefully rebounds.