They called it Death Valley. Today it's a ghost town.

Not long ago, 5,000 people lived in the once-fashionable city district near the Astrodome. Dozens of fine apartment buildings were clustered along Link Valley Drive - buildings with colonial-style pillars, brick facades, wrought-iron balconies, hardwood floors and dining-room chandeliers.

Surrounding neighborhoods still offer middle-class homes that sell for $75,000 to $250,000 each.

"This used to be one of the hot spots in Houston," said police Officer Jim Woods, who grew up a few blocks away. "These apartments were the nicest places to be 15 years ago."

That was before a nice neighborhood was transformed into Houston's most notorious drug-distribution center, a piece of '60s suburbia gone sour.

Six people were killed in Death Valley last year. By then the whole neighborhood had disintegrated into a haven for stop 'n' shop drug dealing. Pushers stood on street corners like parking lot attendants, directing the drive-through drug traffic with flashlights.

Houston police made 200 drug-related arrests last year in Death Valley's vacant and vandalized apartment buildings.

But nothing changed - until nine days ago.

On Jan. 27 Houston police cordoned off the entire 27-acre neighborhood - an area the size of Eola Park in downtown Orlando - with roadblocks and checkpoints. A squad of 100 officers conducted a sweep of the apartment buildings to rid them of the vandals, vagrants, addicts and pushers.

The next day 400 residents from the nearby neighborhoods cut down the waist-high weeds and collected enough trash to fill eight large dumpsters. City health officials collected 150 discarded hypodermic needles used to inject drugs. Scores of empty cellophane packages that once held crack cocaine were found in the apartments.

When the barricades went up and the police moved in, the clock started ticking on a 30-day plan to rid Link Valley of its crime and squalor, even if it means razing the entire neighborhood.

In South Florida recently, residents in several subdivisions erected road barriers to slow down quick-working muggers and burglars. And last year Tampa used seized drug money to finance the bulldozing of more than 60 crack houses throughout the city.

Such efforts are dwarfed by what's happening in Link Valley, however. No one's ever tried this before.

The unusual crackdown was sparked by the killing in September of an elderly woman in a nearby neighorhood. Police investigating the killing found the woman's van backed up to one of Link Valley's vacant apartment buildings. Two men were busy unloading her possessions from the vehicle. They were arrested and charged with murder.

As a result of that case, nine civic clubs from surrounding neighborhoods formed the Stella Link Revitalization Coalition. (Stella Link is one of the area's main thoroughfares.) The coalition's goal: level Link Valley and replace it with an office complex, hotel or shopping mall.

"Link Valley was a blight in an otherwise good neighborhood," said George Harris, a coalition leader. "Once one complex went downhill and unlawful activity started going on, it was just a domino effect through that entire neighborhood."

With the crime had come a Wild West lawlessness. The utility company stopped replacing street lights because the bulbs were constantly being shot out. Police responding to reports of gunshots, drug deals and dead bodies entered Death Valley with guns drawn.

"It was scary coming out here," patrolman Woods said. "It wasn't uncommon for there to be a shooting a week."

Today the main drive is empty. The apartment buildings are abandoned, with broken windows and trash-strewn yards. Swimming pools have been filled with dirt.

Inside, aluminum window frames, copper plumbing and wiring have been ripped from the walls and sold for scrap. Broken glass litters rain-soaked carpets. In one apartment, a partially dismantled bicycle rests upside down in a bare room. In another, dozens of pills are scattered over the floor.

The coalition, representing 6,000 nearby homeowners, is working with the city to track down the buildings' owners and pressure them either to board up their properties or tear them down.

"We want to see the bulldozers running and knocking down those buildings," said Harris, a 33-year-old tax accountant. "Then we hope to find a developer to come in and buy the whole thing and redevelop the whole area."

Nearby residents don't think the apartments can be saved. They prefer razing the structures because the neighborhood, just 10 minutes from downtown Houston, is now prime commercial land likely to attract a developer.

One bank has already agreed to demolish an apartment complex it acquired through foreclosure. The city is exploring legal action against other property owners for health- and building-code violations. Building owners who don't fence or board up their buildings by the end of February could become the target of property liens or lawsuits, city officials say.

In the 1960s, Link Valley was part of suburban Houston. Apartments later left to rats and squatters were once home to medical students, young professionals and athletes. The neighborhood, two miles west of the Astrodome, was ideally located on the then-new interstate beltway that encircles the city.

But as Houston sprawled outward, Link Valley's apartment buildings were usurped by newer, nicer complexes. Occupancy rates slipped, and so did rents.

When the oil glut of the mid-1980s knocked the bottom out of Houston's real estate market, foreclosures, bankruptcies and general abandonment finished off Link Valley. The area was surrendered to the drug pushers and vagrants while the city waited for an economic recovery that was slow in coming.

"What happened in Link Valley is an indictment of this city," said Houston Councilman Vince Ryan, who represents some of the neighborhoods surrounding Link Valley. "It's a failure of the city government to address these problems. We've been sitting with our fingers crossed, waiting for the value of real estate to take care of the problem."

If the retaking of Link Valley succeeds in driving out the city's drug trade and replacing it with new development, it will become a model for other drug-plagued areas of Houston, Ryan said. If it doesn't, he added, Houston will try something else.

Meanwhile, the drug dealers have moved to other street corners, other parking lots, other vacant buildings. Houston is waiting to see if, after a month, the pushers fulfill the vow written in spray paint on the wall of one Death Valley apartment house:

"Be Back 1 Month."