In a meeting room just off of Spring Garden Avenue, Bernard Grady looked at a list of properties and the foreclosed mortgages, housing code cases and ownership questions that entangle them.

As vice president of a new community group, he may now be partly responsible for a condemned bar on Chestnut Street, gutted houses on Tripoli and High streets, a demolition site on Gebhart Street and other sites throughout this slice of the North Side.

They're part of the wreckage of the Spring Garden Neighborhood Council, an organization that for 17 years built quaint townhouses and demanded better rodent control, before embarking on a three-year experiment led by pizza-maker-turned-political-player Jeff Dzamko.

Mr. Grady shook his head. "I think we have to get the money to have someone sort through it all." He and a handful of longtime residents have formed the Community Alliance of Spring Garden East Deutschtown, which is trying to salvage the assets of the Neighborhood Council without being stained by its red ink.

Mr. Dzamko, once secretary/treasurer of Father and Son Pizzeria, is a familiar face at political events, ranging from Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's press conferences to the Democratic National Convention. He's also the subject of a bench warrant for missing a June trial for writing bad checks.

In recent months, he's been a no-show at hearings on housing code citations against him, further clouding the neighborhood's revival effort.

He rose from Neighborhood Council vice president in 2004 to president in 2005. He brought a philosophy called social entrepreneurship and sought to break the neighborhood organization's cycle of dependence on funds from the near-bankrupt city.

"The city was in all of these troubles," Mr. Dzamko said in a recent interview. "How do you find a way to sustain an organization?"

He created a series of small businesses -- in construction, landscaping and sign-making -- that did work for the Neighborhood Council and private clients. His big gamble was opening a Shop 'n Save in Spring Garden.

"It was all pure entrepreneurship, and it was for the neighborhood," he said.

It was not, though, purely privately funded. From late 2004 through early 2007, the city pumped $93,000 into the Neighborhood Council, for things ranging from an anti-gun event to the Shop 'n Save effort to the rehabilitation of the shuttered bar at 923 Chestnut St. In 2005, the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority loaned $150,000 to the Shop 'n Save effort.

The Neighborhood Council also created a separate organization that landed properties cheap, and mortgaged them with private banks for much more. A house at 1007 High St., bought for $22,791, backed a mortgage of $40,000. The hulking Chestnut Street building, bought for $8,900 from the city, backed a $90,000 mortgage. Mr. Dzamko said some of that money was used to start rehabilitation work on those properties.

A Spring Garden Avenue building the Neighborhood Council bought in 1987 for $5,035 was mortgaged for $250,000, to back the grocery store effort.

Now banks and neighbors are holding the bag.

The lenders foreclosed on all three mortgages within two years of their origination. Just $297 of the principal on the $250,000 loan was repaid, and the Spring Garden Avenue building was sold at sheriff's sale.

Only $822 of the principal on the $40,000 loan was repaid, and the bank could have taken the High Street property, but has instead left it in legal limbo. Empty, with a broken window, it has been cited by city building inspectors for rubbish and broken sidewalks.

Foreclosure proceedings against the Chestnut Street property were also put on indefinite hold by the bank. Owned by one of the apparently defunct offshoots of the Neighborhood Council, it has been cited for its rubbish heaps and condemned for cracked walls and rotten rafters. It hasn't yet made the demolition list.

Disentangling the Chestnut Street building's financial and legal condition is important to the neighborhood's future, said Walt Flanigan, president of the Community Alliance. "It's on the main drag. It's on a corner. You could use it for a storefront and have apartments upstairs."

Mr. Dzamko blames the Shop 'n Save venture for the collapse of his efforts.

The idea of reopening the store won business planning competitions and attracted funding from nonprofit groups like the Downtown-based Social Innovation Accelerator, which kicked in $120,000.

But a dispute with the landlord over a promised period of rent-free occupancy wreaked havoc with the cash flow projections. Store income plunged from $1.78 million in 2005 to $801,000 in 2006, according to bankruptcy court filings.

"Every other enterprise that was in motion was pouring resources into the grocery store," Mr. Dzamko said. "It destroyed me."

"At the end of the day, it was a matter of market," said Yarone Zober, who was the treasurer of the grocery store effort before joining city government, where he is now the mayor's chief of staff and the URA board's chairman. The lesson: "You really have to test market conditions before you make investments, especially in retail."

By the time it filed for bankruptcy in mid-2006, the store had less than $5,000 in cash and around $175,000 in property, buried in $721,000 in debts.

Mr. Dzamko said he went six months without pay.

Last year he was charged with passing bad checks to a sign supply company. When he didn't show for a June 18 trial, Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel ordered that sheriffs or police convey him to court.

Mr. Dzamko said the checks bounced because funds were frozen, and that he didn't know about the bench warrant until a reporter told him. Despite the warrant, Mr. Dzamko has continued to show up at events like Mr. Ravenstahl's Aug. 11 announcement, in Highland Park, of a new bike-pedestrian coordinator, and the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Meanwhile, residents forced an election and took control of the Neighborhood Council in November. They've created the new Community Alliance in an effort to start fresh, while exploring how to dissolve the Neighborhood Council and its subsidiaries and gain control of their assets.

"It may be that some assets have to be sold," said state Sen. Jim Ferlo, a URA board member who said he will help if needed. "Some nonprofit corporations may have to go away."

Mr. Dzamko argues that he's no longer part of the picture. He hasn't showed up for recent hearings in which he's named as the party responsible for troubled properties. He skipped a Tuesday hearing before District Judge Richard Zoller on the High Street house, drawing a $1,000 fine.

On Sept. 3, he was a no-show for a hearing before District Judge Robert Ravenstahl Jr., the mayor's father, on a Gebhart Street house owned by one of the Neighborhood Council offshoots. The judge imposed a $500 fine, and the city later razed the trash-strewn house, with taxpayers covering the $6,500 cost.

Mr. Dzamko said that the good things he did for the neighborhood are being ignored.

"I had flowers and gardens and whisky barrels all through the neighborhood," he said. "Every garden I worked on since 2002 is waist-high in weeds."

Others are sore at him for getting so much -- from the city, banks, the nonprofit groups -- that remains unaccounted for.

"We're tired of [the neighborhood] getting run down -- people coming in and taking out what they want," said Mr. Flanigan, of the Community Alliance. "There were vehicles, computers, and we don't know where they are."

Mr. Dzamko said he sold the vehicles, and left the computers in the office.

The Community Alliance members say Spring Garden will get back on track.

"We've got the people believing in us," said Mr. Grady.

And what of Mr. Dzamko?

"The worst form of failure is the failure to try," said Mr. Zober. "That's one way that guys like Jeff will never fail."