For more than a decade, the age-stained plywood blocking the windows at South Gregson Street's former Medical Arts Building has stared lifeless at passersby. And just up the hill on West Chapel Hill Street, two red brick apartment and office buildings have flitted between habitation and vacancy.

Now the owner of the 28,000 square feet plans to renovate and have his property available within two years.

"It's time to get on the bandwagon," says Bill Fields, the owner of 602 and 604 W. Chapel Hill St. and 306 S. Gregson St., the former Medical Arts Building. The bandwagon is the 27 years of success of nearby Brightleaf Square, the upfitting and burgeoning urban life in the nearby Liggett & Myers complex and the jump in real-estate values in and around downtown.

Fields, 61, the owner of seven properties on Ninth Street, knows he has been losing money on the empty buildings. He's been busy on other projects, he says.

But he says he has a clear vision for the Medical Arts Building. "You look at it, and you just can't see it. Drop the grade [of the land], I see it."

What Fields sees for the future is residential, office and retail space in his three buildings that sit on slightly less than two acres backing on the Durham Freeway. For $1.7 million of his own money, the entrances to his two West Chapel Hill Street apartment buildings will face what is now the weed-choked parking lot of the Medical Arts Building on Gregson Street. The building will offer 8,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor and the same amount of office space above.

Edgar Carr, with the architectural firm Robert W. Carr, Inc. Architects, suggested the grade be lowered on the parking lot in front of the old Medical Arts Building. The change drops the entry to the ground floor instead of the current boarded-up entry between the two floors. Plans call for the grade on the right front of the building to be raised and for a walkway with entrances to about eight retail spaces.

An artist's rendering shows metal awnings over the walkway. Metal cladding along the roofline and a metal crown proclaiming "306" on the smokestack will break up the repetition of large windows in the long, horizontal red brick building.

The two apartment buildings and their parking lots will be gated and will link to the Medical Arts Building lot.

"I'm excited about it," Fields says.

He predicts visual signs of change by the turn of the year: a "pristine area" in front of the Medical Arts Building, security fencing for construction and the first exterior improvements.

"We might even get up a sign," he adds. Fields says he has been reluctant to erect a sign announcing the property's future use because his vision hadn't solidified.

Fields is an energetic, expansive sort whose enthusiasm pinballs from his current project to his business beginnings on Ninth Street and back again, with dollops of Durham history in between.

In the spring of 1970, he returned from Vietnam and began working at his father's rented shoe-repair store at 742 Ninth Street. By 1973, he had moved the shop to 730 Ninth Street in what is now Dogstar Tattoo Co. He eventually bought that building and six others as the roadway evolved from a commercial strip across from a dying cotton mill into today's commercial district.

He soon found that the real-estate business suited him. "Once I got a taste of it, it felt pretty good."

Fields' estimate of $1.7 million for the project is thrifty. "I'm a hands-on guy," he says. "I can do it a lot cheaper than other people -- 50 percent cheaper."