Everybody knows Smith Street. It’s one of New York City’s trendiest commercial strips — a drinking and dining mecca that attracts young people from every borough as well as tourists from all over the world. There’s something old-worldish about Smith that has led it to become New York City’s “Little France,” complete with a popular Bastille Day celebration every July. Many have heard that the street is a veritable Cinderella story, but no one knows this rags to riches tale as well as Bette Stoltz, director of the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation (SBLDC). As the first project manager of the Merchants Association of Smith Street (MASS), SBLDC’s predecessor, Stoltz was there in the beginning.

Bette Stoltz discovered she had a gift for organizing community events in 1978 as a volunteer fundraiser for her daughter’s school, P.S 321 in Park Slope. “I was always putting the touch on merchants on Seventh Avenue for donations,” she recalls, “and this was at the time when street fairs were just becoming popular.” The success of the first few Atlantic Antics did not go unnoticed by Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue merchants, who started discussing a street fair of their own, ultimately hiring Stoltz to organize it. “I was the mother of Seventh Heaven,” she notes proudly, “and after that I worked part-time for the Park Slope Chamber of Commerce. I worked on a lot of street activities — like the first Little League parades — that linked businesses with communities in a holistic way.” Former City Councilman Mike Pesce became aware of Stoltz’s work, and in 1980 he hired her to organize a Court Street fair which stretched from Atlantic Avenue to Fourth Street.

It was also in the 1980s that the city began funding commercial revitalization programs. When the stretch of Flatbush Avenue from Atlantic to Grand Army Plaza received such a grant, Stolz became the first project manager for the North Flatbush Avenue Betterment Committee. She worked for two very gratifying years helping Flatbush dump its porno shops and X-rated movie houses and attract new businesses to boarded up storefronts. Less successful was a stint in pre-minor-league-stadium Coney Island, where she was hired to organize a business improvement district among the amusement area property owners: “It didn’t work because people weren’t able to get along, particularly when it came to spending money.”

Then the late realtor and community activist Carl Peek asked Stoltz for help in writing a proposal for city funding to reenergize Smith Street. The proposal was accepted, and Bette Stoltz was the natural choice for director of MASS.

What did she see in 1984 when she surveyed her new responsibility — eleven dreary blocks from Atlantic Avenue to Union Street? There was a 27 percent overall vacancy rate; south of Baltic Street more than 50 percent of the storefronts were empty. The pavement was full of ruts, and the sidewalks were so broken up that it was next to impossible to push a stroller or shopping cart along them. The urban pioneers that were filling up the side streets couldn’t find anything they wanted to buy on Smith and avoided the street altogether when I.S. 293 on Court and Butler was dismissed. At 3:00 p.m., shopkeepers either locked their doors or stood in them guarding their property, as unruly groups of students made their way to the subway.

That was the bad news. The good news, according to Stoltz, was that Smith Street was so small town: “The street is narrow enough to shout a conversation across it, and most of the people who owned the buildings either lived upstairs or operated the stores. People knew their neighbors and they cared about the street. This gives you the chance to organize a whole constituency, a whole community. The job was a sales job; I had to sell a street.”

The grant from the city, Stoltz explains, consisted of “a lot of interesting tools to encourage change.” There was free architectural advice and rebates on labor and materials for whatever was done to improve the building or store. All the property owner had to do was to follow the architectural guidelines. “What had to happen,” Stoltz continues, “were hundreds of individual conversations to move people by small increments toward where they needed to go to get their piece of the pie. Whoever was ready to spend some money on improvements to their property was going to get our design attention and our rebates. And when others heard that the promised checks actually arrived, they followed suit.”

And so property owners got busy restoring decorative masonry and repairing cornices. They put up awnings, removed paint from brickwork, installed new showcase windows and security systems. As the structural improvements took on a life of their own, Stoltz talked to the business owners about their wares. Soon hardware stores began stocking spotlights where there had only been fluorescents and incandescent bulbs before, and the liquor stores began featuring better wines attractively displayed in wicker baskets, doing away with the plexiglass that had separated the sales person from the customer.

Addressing the school dismissal problem, Stoltz enlisted the help of the 84th Precinct, which responded with more manpower. In addition, MASS “very quickly got into the after-school business” offering classes in art, carpentry, music, and cooking to the students at I.S. 293. [The music and cooking programs continue to this day. SBLDC also runs a Shadow Program for all the middle schools in the former Community School District 15, now part of Instructional Division 8. The program pairs 85 students with mentors in after-school internships.]

Meanwhile, Smith Street’s infrastructure needed tending.

The renewal of Smith Street properties, bolstered by complimentary architectural expertise and rebates on labor and materials provided by the city, took on a life of its own in the mid-1980s. At the same time, Bette Stoltz, project manager for the Merchants Association of Smith Street (MASS), predecessor of the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation (SBLDC), was working to nail down the city’s promise to fix the dilapidated infrastructure of the strip. This was essential for attracting new businesses.

The furrowed pavement was bad, but not as bad as the sinking sidewalks. “Smith Street was built at a time when buildings were heated by either wood or coal,” Stoltz explains, “so there are underground fuel storage vaults next to the buildings. It was also hollow on the curbside of the sidewalks because the subway line runs underneath. So there was really only a center strip of earth, which was not maintained, that was supporting the sidewalks.”

The preliminary design for the street reconstruction was approved in 1984; it took another ten years for the first pick to strike pavement. “Our street reconstruction was the best-researched and best-planned of any I am aware of,” Stoltz recalls. “There were absolutely no surprises. The engineers evaluated every basement before the work started because we wanted to make sure that they knew what was under every piece of concrete.”

Complete street reconstructions are almost always a Pandora’s box of tribulations, but not Smith Street’s. Noted Stoltz, “The problems that usually make digging up a street a nightmare for merchants just didn’t happen here. We had anticipated everything. We were one step ahead.” The official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the completion of the reconstruction of Smith Street, which included the installation of historic replica street lights-the envy of the neighborhood-was held in 1996. “Give us the infrastructure and they will come.” This had long been the mantra of John Verrangia of Johnnie’s Bootery at 208 Smith. Verrangia, whose business is a well-established family enterprise, was the outspoken president of MASS and Bette Stoltz’s chief ally. His message to city officials was always the same: helping Smith with façade facelifts was great for existing businesses, but new entrepreneurs were unlikely to settle there if the street and sidewalks continued to deteriorate. Verrangia was right; the street was fixed and the new merchants arrived, led by Marquet Patisserie (now on Court Street); Patois, the restaurant pioneer that heralded a migration of well-respected chefs and restaurateurs to Boerum Hill; Astroturf, which sells retro home furnishings; and the hand-made accessory shop, Refinery.

“For the most part,” Stoltz reveals, “the new entrepreneurs were people who had lived in the area for a number of years and were watching the changes that were being made. And we were fortunate that the vacancies fell in such a way that the new owners were clustered together, so there was a built-in support network and feeling of community.”

Stoltz says that Patois’s back-story is a good example of how the old and new were brought together to effect the Smith Street renaissance. Alan Harding is executive chef and part-owner of the restaurant, which is described in the Zagat Survey as having “started the Smith Street boom.” Stoltz met Harding when he worked at Bouillabaisse on Atlantic Avenue. She asked him if he would be a guest chef for an after-school cooking class that MASS ran, and Harding agreed.

As a local resident, Alan Harding was aware of Smith Street’s incremental improvement, and when he was ready to open a restaurant of his own, he approached the owner of the building at 255 Smith. The property owner said he wasn’t interested, but Bette Stoltz knew where he lived: “Alan needed a little help in convincing the owner of the building that this was something that could succeed on Smith Street, so I rang the landlord’s bell to offer my support. I told him that I thought the restaurant could work and I asked him to give Alan a chance.”

Stoltz’s chutzpah paid off. Patois was a smash, and Harding has gone on to open a number of other bars and restaurants in the neighborhood. And with his reputation as the chef with the golden touch, he has been hired by several other local entrepreneurs to assist them with design and menus for their new enterprises. “The last time I counted,” Stoltz notes, “there were 65 eating and drinking establishments on Smith Street, which has 225 storefronts in its architectural stock, and I believe five or six more restaurants have been added since then.”

The late realtor and community activist Carl Peek, who, with Stoltz, had written the initial proposal for city funding to improve Smith Street, approached her with another idea in the mid-’80s. It was time, he suggested, that MASS move on. With all of the activities it coordinated — in particular the after-school programs — the organization had become much more than a merchants association. So Stoltz applied for local development corporation status, and in 1987 the South Brooklyn LDC was launched. Under the LDC umbrella and with funds awarded through another grant, Bette Stoltz opened an additional office in Red Hook in 1990 to assist blue collar industries there. Funding ended for that project just this year, and the Southwest Brooklyn LDC has picked up where Stoltz left off. “We are still involved in terms of advocacy for land use and the zoning needed to support industry, and we are following the plans for Piers 6-12 closely because it’s very important that a working waterfront remains there,” Stoltz insists.

Bette Stoltz adds that her organization is ready for yet another change: “Our funding is not going to last forever, yet the function that we serve has to be maintained-someone must continue to be the voice of Smith Street, and, personally, I would like to see the projects that I’ve spent so much of my life working on continue after I retire.”

To that end, Stoltz reveals, she will be working this year on groundwork for the formation of a permanent Smith Street Business Improvement District.

Looking back on almost 20 years as chief booster for the Little Street That Could, Bette Stoltz says that what she recalls most fondly are the small milestones. The recognition, the press coverage, the Zagat seals of approval are nice, she admits, but most gratifying for her are recollections of such events as the first storefront awning unfurled on Smith Street due to her efforts and the first time that peeling paint was removed from a façade to reveal lovely old brick. Those are the streetscapes that are tucked away in Bette Stoltz’s memory bank.