The Old North St. Louis neighborhood is really gaining traction as a community on the rise — evidenced in part by this laudatory piece by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a high profile national environmental group.

The piece begins this way:

Every now and then I run across a story that is so good, that feels so right, that I thank my lucky stars for the freedom NRDC gave me to evolve my career into working for better, more sustainable communities. This is such a story, and it reveals an historic, diverse, inclusive neighborhood that is reclaiming its identity, restoring its infrastructure, empowering its residents, and securing its future. The community wins, and so does the environment, because the Old North neighborhood in Saint Louis is the very antithesis of sprawl.

What city neighborhood wouldn’t want that kind of notice?

I intend to spend some time in Old North from time to time in the coming months, but my sense of the place is that it has been successful because it has leveraged to the max its natural advantages: close proximity to Downtown, a still integral core of enviable historic housing, compact size, distinctly local commercial institutions with real depth — and of course of a dedicated cadre of energetic, imaginative residents devoted to making things happen.