Local leaders now envision the city center as a 24-hour-a-day hub, luring more financial giants like Swiss Bank, providing hundreds of new apartments and offering ever livelier choices in dining, shopping and entertainment. They believe Stamford can cultivate a vibrant pedestrian environment, too, having learned from the urbanistic mistake in the last boom of setting new buildings atop parking garages, which created a barren, fortress-like streetscape.

''The community is maturing and seeing itself as a city,'' Mayor Malloy said. ''I'd defy you to find a city of 100,000 that's built 1,000 units of housing in 20 years -- and we've done it in three.''

After 37 years of redevelopment, the Rich family takes an even longer view. ''What's happening fits in with our plan,'' said Robert N. Rich, president of the Rich Company. ''I always said that the major housing thrust couldn't occur until we changed the character of downtown.''

Today, that transformation continues, on the very site that Morgan Stanley abandoned. There, SBC Warburg, the investment-banking division of Swiss Bank, is building a $150 million, 570,000-square-foot North American corporate center that will include what its architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, believe will be the largest clear-span trading floor in North America.

On the Swiss Bank campus, an intricately landscaped park called Gateway Commons will be laid out along Washington Boulevard after the demolition next year of an office building at No. 655. The park is intended as a welcoming pedestrian link to the Stewart B. McKinney Transportation Center, which includes the Metro-North Railroad station. The station will be extended toward the commons next year after the construction of a new concourse, also designed by Skidmore, under the elevated highway.

Drivers will find the garage at Swiss Bank tucked as far out of sight as a 1,400-space structure can be: behind a 13-story office tower and under the 60,000-square-foot trading floor, with its distinctive roof, reminiscent of a giant airfoil. In future phases, one or two more office buildings may be added to the 12-acre campus and the trading floor may also grow in size.

JUST up Washington Boulevard, at Broad Street, the vacant Bloomingdale's has been stripped to a structural skeleton that looks for the moment like the hypostyle hall of an Egyptian temple. After a $40 million transformation, to be completed next year, this will be the Stamford branch of the University of Connecticut.