“You have to think of the territory of the Bronx in two parts, east and west, divided by the Bronx River, the city’s only true river,” says the publisher of the Norwood News, Dart Westphal.

“The east Bronx is like Queens. The west Bronx, with its handsome old buildings, is more like Washington Heights. Now consider the triangle of events. You have Co-op City opening in 1972, New York University moving out in 1974, Burnside Avenue burning during the blackout of 1977,” he says, spreading a large bus map of the Bronx in front of him and circling fallen landmarks as if he were discussing Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. To Bronx residents who endured the devastation of their borough in the 1970s, the winter siege of 1812 can seem an apt analogy.

Mr. Westphal’s own neighborhood of Norwood, a multiethnic, vibrant enclave at the northern terminus of the D subway line, never really fell. But it suffered, even though it’s one of the prettiest and most defined areas of the city – bounded by Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery on the north, Bronx Park (with the New York Botanical Garden) on the south and east, and Mosholu Parkway to the south and west. “So much property was overvalued in the 1970s,” says Mr. Westphal. “Some owners overpaid, then got overextended. Profit margins were very small. You didn’t need a big change to get in trouble. The huge fuel increases could do it. Then interest rates took off. People started losing money left and right. Tenants left for new places like Co-op City. That would have been fine – except that no one was moving in.”

Those desolate days aren’t even a vague memory to the young New Yorkers now discovering the neighborhood, which saw a 12% increase in population between 1990 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census. A musician, Scott Rimm-Hewitt, and his girlfriend, newly arrived from North Carolina, were enchanted as soon as they saw Norwood last August. (A stranger named Eddie had spotted them wandering in an adjacent area and drove them to Norwood, saying he knew just what they wanted.) They started walking around, knocking on the doors of superintendents seeking a one-bedroom, which they eventually found for $710 a month in a five-story building on 207th Street.

“We got very excited,” recalls Mr. Rimm-Hewitt. “This was for us. I could go jogging, walk the dog, and practice the tuba all in the Oval, a block away.” (The Williamsbridge Oval Park, which had been a reservoir until the 1930s, is now gathering place, park, and playground.)

Richard Goodman, the principal of Goodman Management – which manages some 45 buildings throughout the city and owns several more – says rents have been rising steadily since Mr. Rimm-Hewitt got his apartment. Generally, one-bedroom apartments rent today for between $800 and $900. “And we have waiting lists for our best buildings,” he adds. Mr. Goodman is the sponsor and managing agent for what is known as Norwood’s most elegant building, the Lenru Co-op, named for its original owners, Lenny and Ruth, in the fashion of many immigrant neighborhoods in the 1920s. One-bedroom apartments in the imposing courtyard building at the base of Wayne Avenue now sell for about $95,000; two-bedrooms for $145,000 to 150,000, and three-bedrooms for $175,000, says Mr. Goodman.

A middle-school teacher, Janet Norquist-Gonzalez, who bought her spacious three-bedroom, two-bath room apartment in 1996 for $90,000, says she pays a high monthly maintenance fee of $900 but with excellent results. The management company is well-organized and strikes the right balance between benevolence and toughness, she notes, serving all residents equally, including the older renters who have not bought their apartments. “Goodman is very particular about things. He has the basement floor painted yearly. We have a guard every evening. We just replaced the roof, using an excellent contractor who was not the lowest bidder. We’ve had the pointing done. Once a month in the summer gardeners come to take care of the courtyard and its tulip and dogwood trees.” And indeed, the building has the burnished look more often associated with the Upper East Side than with the Bronx.

An award-winning cartographer, Ms. Norquist-Gonzalez treasures the topography around her. “We’re at the highest point of the Bronx,” she says, pointing downtown from her bedroom window, from which she used to be able to see the World Trade Center. (Her husband, the Latin percussionist and WBAI producer Ibrahim Gonzalez, saw the towers fall and feared that she had been killed because she was working downtown at the time.) All the windows on the apartment’s East Side open onto the Oval and a view that’s reminiscent of Prague, she says, citing the wide expanse of trees, the church steeples, Fordham University in the background, the Bronx School of Science, and the Botanical Garden in the distance.

Like other New York neighborhoods, Norwood has reaped the benefits of declining crime. The 52nd Precinct – which covers Bedford Park, Fordham Bedford, and University Heights in addition to Norwood – has seen an overall decline of 60% in violent crime since 1993 and a stunning 82% decline in murder. Ms. Norquist-Gonzalez is a classic Jane-Jacobs-eyes-on-the-street New Yorker who is quick to call the cops or local officials when something bad happens. “I report everything I see,” she says. “My brother John [Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee] taught me that local politicians are very happy to take action on concrete things. So I’m in touch with our representatives, and whenever I call the precinct they are very courteous, very responsive. They send a car right over. Also, our neighbor Montefiore has attentive guards. We feel safe being right here.”

The largest private employer in the Bronx, the 121-year-old Montefiore Hospital is one of the reasons Norwood survived intact. As the devastation of the South Bronx seemed to march northward toward Fordham Road in the 1970s, Montefiore established the nonprofit Mosholu Preservation Corporation to provide technical assistance on maintenance and renovation to building owners, to offer second mortgages to owners unable to get financing elsewhere, and, on rare occasions, to buy important properties that would otherwise erode the neighborhood. Even today, Montefiore is a commanding presence. When an ugly, 10-year dispute between Fordham University and the Botanical Garden over Fordham’s radio antenna worsened with time, Montefiore stepped in with a solution: It offered the roof of its newly built apartment building on Wayne Avenue as a site for the antenna. Ms. Norquist-Gonzalez, who can see the roof from her kitchen window, approves because it saves the garden’s unspoiled view. “Montefiore was very emphatic about what they would and would not accept,” she says. “They watch out for our interests.”

The neighborhood’s future will surely be different than its past. A demographer and Lehman College professor, William Bosworth, says Norwood will stay middle class but will be a “very interesting, dynamic, multiethnic middle class of Hispanics, Indians, Asians, and other immigrants.” Meanwhile, Mr. Rimm-Hewitt bikes to work at P.S. 246, where he teaches music to kindergartners. Most of the parents are immigrants. “They’re great parents,” he says. “Very supportive of the arts.” He’s starting a quintet with friends who graduated from Julliard, Indiana, and Yale. They hope to stay in the borough and call the quintet the Bronx Brass.