Postscript : Going for Baroque Gets Mixed Review : Brazil’s largest renovation project, in historic Salvador, lures tourists but banishes the original residents--and a certain spirit.

Celso Ricardo de Paiva should have been pleased. Instead, the 29-year-old building superintendent gazed down the rolling cobblestone streets of his beloved Pelourinho community, the heart of Brazil’s historic city of Salvador, and grunted his disapproval.

Down one sloping street, state workers in bright orange coveralls were repairing six-foot-wide gouges that could politely be called potholes. Others were replacing antiquated sewer lines from which a foul stench rose and spread through narrow walkways.

Up another street, workers were carefully applying the last touches to the ornate trimmings of 300-year-old buildings, just a few of the hundreds that are being restored in Brazil’s largest renovation project ever.

Their rotting walls and ceilings have been replaced, and centuries of plaster, paint and grime have been swept away to reveal the astonishing baroque facades that led the United Nations in 1984 to declare Pelourinho a “patrimony to mankind,” a world historical site.

With the $30-million project nearly complete, restaurants, clothing stores and tourist shops have sprouted on streets that were so crime-ridden a few years ago that many were wary of using them by day or night.

De Paiva, a lifelong Pelourinho resident, stretched his arms toward the renovation and sighed in dismay.

“Before this,” he began slowly, “we had things, and we had humanity. Now, all we have are the things. The humanity is gone.”

The humanity was the 2,500 families in a community that has been a spiritual and cultural focal point for much of Brazil, particularly for the millions whose ancestors were part of the slave trade that fueled Salvador’s emergence in the 1600s and who account for nearly half of Brazil’s population.

All but a handful of the old Pelourinho residents are gone. To make way for the renovation, they were either forced out by riot police or left voluntarily with small sums of state-paid relocation money in hopes of finding a better life away from Pelourinho.

Now the absence of the kinds of people who gave the community its flavor, who created and nourished the African-based religions, music and dance that are so deeply rooted in most of Brazilian culture, has caused some critics to declare the project a failure.

They argue that while the government has saved the body that is Pelourinho, it has killed off its soul.

“The idea and principle was good,” said Raimundo Jorge Kalile Passis, a tour guide, resident and local historian. “But the reality is different. It was supposed to be that with the renovation, the people who lived here could get jobs here and then rent a place nearby or stay in the renovated buildings.

“But the stores didn’t hire the people who lived here. They can’t afford to shop here. So they have all moved out. And Pelourinho was the people.”

For Americans, Pelourinho is perhaps best known as the setting for “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,” a 1977 movie based on a novel by Brazilian Jorge Amado. Or they know it from the Paul Simon music video featuring Olodum, a Brazilian music and dance troupe.

For Salvadorans, Pelourinho takes on an almost mystical quality. The name, which means little pillar , is taken from the blocks where slaves were whipped and sold when Pelourinho’s main square and Salvador were the center of the nation’s slave trade, and the crops were sugar and coffee.

When the English Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Salvador was the 71-year-old colonial capital of Brazil. Second only to Lisbon in Portugal’s far-flung empire, 18th-Century Salvador was the busiest port in the southern Atlantic.

The Pelourinho community eventually became home to the city’s well-to-do families. But after the capital moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo emerged as the nation’s business center, the moneyed Salvadorans began to desert the city center for the new power centers to the south. Repairs needed to maintain the centuries-old buildings went undone. Squatters and prostitutes moved in.

Eventually, Pelourinho became the city’s red-light district.

In 1990, state officials devised a plan to revitalize the area. They moved out tenants and struck up joint ventures with absentee landlords in exchange for renovating their properties. Trendy restaurants and shops, many owned by French and Italians, emerged.

Business has been good.

“I’m very satisfied,” said Cecy de Almeida Drummond, who opened a restaurant a year ago with her daughter. “We’re already enlarging. We get a lot of state workers now, bank workers, tourists, not people from the lower class.”

Tourists like it.

“This is something wonderful,” said George Galran of Lisbon, admiring the changes on the same streets he visited five years ago. “When they are finished, it will be a beautiful town for everybody, for the people who live here and for the tourists.”

Gilberto Souza Lima, 39, who lives in another part of town but has owned a cabinet shop with his brother in Pelourinho for nine years, is not so sure. “They are turning it into a place more comfortable for tourists and less comfortable for Salvadorans,” he said.

State officials say that such criticism is unfair. They say that except for special occasions such as Carnaval, most of the residents of Brazil’s fourth-largest city rarely visited Pelourinho for fear of crime or because there was nothing to attract them to the area.

As for the mostly poor, mostly black residents who lived there, not one is worse off now because nothing could be worse than their previous living conditions in Pelourinho, said Paulo Robert Cerqueira Silva, who heads part of the renovation project. Many, he said, have improved their lives, such as Carlos Souza Santos, who took his state payment and bought a house.

“Even if we had done nothing in Pelourinho, those people probably wouldn’t be here today because the buildings were literally falling down,” Silva said.

Arli Menezes, a local architect, agreed. “I’ve watched a lot of these buildings just collapse,” he said. “Before the project, the maintenance was haphazard. One house would be restored and the other would be falling down. It is an excellent project.”

But there is one drawback, Menezes said.

“I don’t think I can afford to shop or eat in the new Pelourinho.”