Good times in the Old Town.

• Author: Murphy-Larronde, Suzanne
• Position: Old Mazatlan, Mexico

IT'S A BALMY SATURDAY evening on pint-size Plazuela Machado in the heart of Mazatlan's historic district. The adjacent sidewalks and streets are filled with brightly adorned cafe tables where scores of locals and tourists have come to dine. Steps away on the square, crowned by a gleaming green bandstand, families mill about or sit on new benches beneath golden shower trees admiring the newly illuminated buildings. Following long decades of decline, Old Mazatlan is staging a vigorous comeback with the help of an ambitious grass-roots revitalization program.

Mazatlan, population about 400,000, was founded by the Spanish in the early 1500s and the discovery of bountiful gold and silver deposits in nearby mines transformed it into one of Mexico's busiest ports. But the Old Town that visitors see today was built in the wake of Mexican independence in 1821, when European immigrants of German, Spanish, Basque, North American, and Asian descent settled the area. Over the following decades, the maritime and railway connections they developed transformed Mazatlan into an international trade center and, for about fifteen years, the state capital of Sinaloa.

The boom times continued into the next century and, in 1923, with the construction of the Belmar Hotel on oceanside Olas Altas Boulevard, Mazatlan became the leading beach resort of Mexico's northwest. Its fame as a sports fishing mecca spread in the 1940s, and in 1944 the multi-storied Hotel Freeman brought the town's first high-rise and elevator. But as tourism took off, the historic center fell from favor as its younger residents abandoned it for the suburbs. Worse still, dozens of the town's vintage buildings were torn down and replaced by boxy modern structures. But the coup de grace came in the late 1970s with the birth of the Zona Dorada, a multi-mile complex of hotels, restaurants, shops, and other tourist-oriented businesses that converted Old Mazatlan from an attraction to an afterthought on the tourism agenda of many visitors.

The district's turnaround began in the late 1980s when locals spearheaded the restoration of historic Angela Peralta Theater, just off Plazuela Machado. The crumbling structure, (renamed in 1943 for the internationally acclaimed "Mexican Nightingale" who succumbed to yellow fever prior to her debut there in 1883), underwent a spectacular renovation and again...