Hizzonner Bill Bell, in his state of the city speech the other night, commended the Uplift East Durham folks for their bottom-up endeavor at turning around a long-troubled part of town.

A point well taken -- coming, as it did, after a litany of public-sector projects to do the same sort of thing.

After some years of clean-up and watch-out and spread-the-word projects, Uplift East Durham is holding a tour of homes this weekend to interest buyers and sellers of real estate in investing in the historic but high-crime Driver Street-Angier Avenue section.

That's all in the Bull City tradition. East Durham may be a district of ill repute nowadays, but, hard as it may be to believe, even tony Trinity Park was, a generation or so back, a neighborhood on the way down.

That was before one 1972 morning when residents were roused by the sound of buzzsaws -- and learned that the city, in its infinite wisdom, was out to connect Hillsborough Road to downtown with a thoroughfare by way of Buchanan Boulevard and West Trinity Avenue -- in the process taking down the stately oaks standing in the way of progress.

The peasants marched with scythes and pitchforks (figurative, of course) on City Hall. One old vet of the City Council grumped that Durham couldn't just stay "a sleepy little college town," but the point was won. The trees remain and the peasants learned they could fight City Hall, after all -- in a city long reputed to do its real governing off the record and out of sight.

So began the neighborhood organizing and politics-as-participant sport that now seems hard-wired into Durham's civic culture. But it wasn't the first time citizens succeeded with pushing their own agendas.

In the 1920s, the city grudgingly formed a recreation department after pressuring from a playground commission from seven civic clubs. Poor kids got school lunches in Durham by way of a civic club, which also made loans to keep teenagers in school. As the historian Jean Anderson put it in her book "Durham County," "They took the lead because local government defaulted."

And then there is the Eno River, destined in the '60s by powers on high to become Lake Eno, rimmed with a scenic drive and high-rise apartments and office buildings -- until, that is, Margaret Nygard and her eco-stalwarts dragged a city of smokestacks into the Age of Aquarius. Rather than a reservoir Durham got a woodsy park for all to frolic about.

Citizen activism doesn't always succeed -- think Southpoint -- and excessive zeal can lead to backfires.

Still, Durham and its citizens are the better for it. Uplift East Durham may or may not make Angier Avenue into the next Club Boulevard, but local experience is encouraging when homefolks get on the job.

Cleaning up East Durham, that is -- a job the city has said it was meaning to do since only 1993. Power to the people, no?