Lancaster County looks down on Lancaster City, and Lancaster City looks down on "the ward," and that's where I live.

The source of this looking-down is supposed to be crime, vice, and disorder, but it probably comes down mostly to race.

Lancaster County spreads over a level and fertile plain of limestone soil, ideal farmland, that was pioneered by Swiss Mennonites starting in 1710 and settled rapidly in the 1730s by other German sects, including the Amish, the Moravians, and weird utopian experiments like the Ephrata Cloister.

As a political entity, the county was carved off from Chester County in 1729, while it was mostly wilderness with no real center of population. Andrew Hamilton, one of the most skilled lawyers in the colonies, learned the commissioners were looking at three sites for a county seat, and he quickly bought one of them from a speculator in London. He then had little trouble persuading the commissioners to locate the county seat on his land.

Hamilton turned the tract over to his son, James, an able businessman who laid out the town of Lancaster beginning in 1730, based on a north-south grid. Where the main north-south street (Queen Caroline Street, now simply Queen Street) intersected the principal east-west street (King George Street, now King Street, where I live), he laid out a square for the courthouse and the whipping post. At the west side of the square Hamilton deeded a large lot for a public farmers market.

After 1735 the Hamilton lots sold rapidly. Purchasers were required to build within two years a "substantial" house of not less than sixteen feet square, and having a "good chimney of brick or stone, laid with lime and sand mortar." By 1742, when Lancaster was chartered as a borough, houses lined several streets.

The geography of this colonial housing project, I'm convinced, is a key to the current state of the town. You have to step back a bit to see the big picture, though. The Conestoga River, the main waterway hereabouts, flows more or less southwest. So naturally, the Penn land grants were laid out in reference to the river, to make sure as many people as possible got frontage on it. That leaves you with a chessboard of squares, one of which was where Hamilton started building the town.

But he laid it out in proper geographical orientation, with the grid running north-south and east-west. That means the two main streets ran out to the "points" of his lot, like the struts of a kite.

Once the town started prospering, Hamilton's neighbors got into the act, and dug up their wheat and hemp fields and laid out streets of their own. But they, looking only for profit, laid out the grids parallel to their lot lines. You get more houses in that way, see, and more of them backed up to the Hamilton lots.

So a map of modern Lancaster looks something like a British Union flag: north and south streets through the center, but in the quadrants, streets running off at 45-degree angles to these.

Hamilton encouraged a middle-class community of self-supporting artisans, mechanics, tradesmen, and other professionals. The well-off lived in his part of the town, on the wide main streets, in their "substantial" homes. The poor and the working class, meanwhile, built any sort of small log or frame homes along the narrow, angle streets.

I live on one of the main Hamilton streets, but on the periphery of one of these homely quadrants -- the southeast one (originally called Mussertown, after the farmer who laid it out, though the name is long forgotten), which has been a center of the black community since at least 1817. Some of them owned property, some were self-employed tradesmen.

Lancaster prospered as a market town, providing professional services -- from lawyers to prostitutes -- for the farmers whose wagon-loads of grain (in the locally made conestoga wagons) rumbled down the highways to the docks of Philadelphia and Newport to feed the Caribbean slave plantations. By the time of the Revolution, Lancaster was the largest inland city in America.

During the middle of the 19th century, immigrants from Ireland and Germany arrived, and they, too, found homes at first in the southeast quadrant of the city. The Germans also took over the southwest, a region called "Cabbage Hill," which remained distinctly German until about 20 years ago.

Greek and Italian immigration followed in the early 20th century, following the same pattern: settling first in the southeast, then moving up, on, and out. Greeks were the scum of the city in 1900; now they're among the most prosperous suburbanites, with several judges to their credit.

The people in the city think of themselves in terms of the nine voting wards, and the most well-identified, both by residents and outsiders, is the Seventh Ward -- known colloquially as simply "the ward." This is the heart of the southeast quadrant, and I live right inside the northern edge of it.

When I studied the 1900 census, this was the city's most ethnical diverse place. Jews, Germans, blacks, Irish, and Italians lived there amongst one another or in shifting enclaves. Of the city's 1,000 or so blacks, nearly half were in the Seventh Ward.

Today, Lancaster City is the second most ethnically diverse city or borough in Pennsylvania, after only Reading, in the county just northeast of here. Of course, Reading is a shithole, one of 25 most violent places in America, with a rotting corpse for a downtown.

Lancaster City is now about a third white, a third black, a third Hispanic. Hispanics started to come in the 1970s, or thereabouts. Some of the chicken processing plants out in New Holland brought them in as laborers -- but forbid them to live in rural New Holland, for fear of upsetting the locals. Instead, they were told to rent in Lancaster City, on the other end of the bus line.

Word-of-mouth speeded the influx. The county got a reputation among Hispanics in the cities -- New York, Philadelphia -- as a safe place with good schools and jobs. It may be all these things, compared to the inner city, but in trying to get away from trouble, the newcomers brought a lot of it with them, and we now have some really violent losers here, along with local branches of some of the most notorious gangs.

The county and the city are very different places. The county is 92 percent white. Blacks are only 2.8 percent of the county's total population of 470,658. Some townships and boroughs have no black residents at all. And, frankly, they like it that way.

About 15 percent of the households in the city are headed by a single female parent of at least one child under 18. County-wide, the figure is about 4 percent. In the city, fewer than half the children live in a family that includes a married couple. Outside the city, almost 86 percent do.

It's a point of honor among some long-time residents of the county never to set foot in the city unless they absolutely have to. Perception counts for much. Overall crime in the city has been dropping across the board. Violent crime was down 17 percent in 2001 from the year before. Yet when the suburban teams venture in to play the city high school in night games, they openly profess to fear for their lives.

Small towns and suburbs send their disturbed and homeless into the city, because that's where "services" are available, while suburban churches pour money into downtown "missions" and shelters that draw drunks and addicts like magnets. All the while, people in these places wrinkle their noses at the shabby characters they're likely to see if they visit Lancaster city.

The flip side of that coin would be the number of suburban addresses that appear on the blotter after police sweeps of the customers of city drug dealers and prostitutes.

People who come to Lancaster County to live, do so to be among farmers and good, rural church-going white folks. While tract housing chews up the rural townships, homes in the city take forever to sell, sell for less than they're worth, and often can only be sold to slumlords who split them up into apartments and move more human scum into them.

Though local politicians give lip service to the idea that the county and the city prosper or suffer together, in fact there's a lot of animosity. The leadership of the city is traditionally Democratic, as is its state representative. The GOP so dominates the rest of the county that, if three of every four Republicans were abducted by aliens on the eve of the next election, the Democrats would still lose handily.

Like most rust belt cities, Lancaster has been in a slow economic decline for years. The opening of the first local strip mall in 1958 exactly coincided with the beginning of the decline in downtown business profits.

The manufacturing base carefully built up over decades has largely melted away. The textile mills are gone. Hamilton Watch is gone. Slaymaker Lock is gone; RCA is gone; Schick is gone. Bulova survives, as does Armstrong (the flooring firm, now mired in asbestos lawsuits) and there's a big Kelloggs plant.

Lancaster City's population has dropped to its lowest number since 1920 -- barely over 56,000. The schools are a shambles. They're underfunded by the state, and struggling to deal with a lot of children of transient, impoverished, violent families. Huge property tax hikes loom, and the tax base is shrinking. The schools are always on the verge of being taken over by the state and turned over to private companies due to appalling test scores and high drop-out rates. The elementary schools are not bad, and the high school has much good about it. The middle schools are absolutely abominable.

The center square of the downtown has a big white elephant on one corner -- the former Watt & Shand department store, empty since 1996 or so. At one point a community college was going to move in there, but the city didn't want that property off the tax rolls. Now the idea is to build a big convention center there, with a Marriott hotel attached.

This is supposed to be the salvation of Lancaster. But I have to wonder how smart that is, because every community in America, from Philadelphia to East Jesus, Minn., seems to have staked its future on a convention center. There's going to be an awful lot of them in a few years, and there aren't that many big conventions, and can you really make these things fly just by bringing in the Mid-Atlantic cross-stitch guild once every five years?

Yet the convention center is alluring because there's already a huge flow of tourists through the county, and they never see the city.

The tourism thing developed in the mid-'50s, and it got a big boost in 1985, with the release of the immensely popular Harrison Ford movie "Witness," set among the Amish. It brought world-wide attention and a big spike in tourist trips that didn't start to fade for another 10 years. Millions of visitors come every year and spend billions of dollars.

But, of course, making the place into a tourist destination destroys the special identity that tourists come here to see. The old farms and brick taverns that defined the county's rural charm have been plowed under to make way for attractions like a hotel in the shape of a Mississippi riverboat. Whole stretches of Route 30 and chunks of towns like Strasburg and Intercourse have become tourist ghettoes.

There's a good side to the tourist strips, with their mock "Amish farms" and a million tacky gift shops: they concentrate the stupidity, and allow the real Amish to farm in relative peace on the back roads, away from tour buses and intruders.

The tourist trade here has evolved into an odd trilogy. There's the Amish stuff, some of it now more than 30 years old and looking decidedly seedy. Now there are outlet malls, several of them, and they are formidable. Whole chartered buses of professional shoplifters from Philadelphia hit them on the weekend.

The third head is Xtian theater. There are impossibly tacky venues like "Sight and Sound Theater," all bombast and third-rate dinner theater and no taste. You can see it from the high ground when I drive back and forth to Strasburg to pick up Luke. I call it Plywood Paradise. The shows are like some Monty Python parody, it stages big Biblical spectacles wherein Jesus zaps sinners in high-tech laser light shows. People stand in the aisles and wave their arms and praise God.

So you take your three-day weekend, spend one day gawking at the Amish, one day shopping, and one day in Plywood Paradise. But you never set foot in Lancaster City, or spend a dime there, during any of this.

Even if conventioneers want to wander out and spend some bucks downtown (and there's no guarantee that they will), what has the city got to offer them? They pretty much roll up the sidewalks at 6 p.m. The Central Market, a genuine old farmers' market with lots of character and one of my favorite places, is a gem. But that's only open three mornings a week. There's a funky shopping strip, but it's only one block long. At night there's nothing going on except the Chameleon Club, which spawned Live and some other bands, and even that has scaled back to mostly DJ dances.

We've got history. That's probably the best package. We've got James Buchanan's home, which is a nice spot. We've got a great Civil War hero in Maj. Gen. John Fulton Reynolds, a very competent (and handsome) Northern military man, killed on the first day at Gettysburg. But they haven't managed to package his property into anything yet.

And we've got Charles Demuth, an early 20th century watercolorist whose reputation is really growing in art circles. There's a neat little museum in his house and gardens, a couple of blocks down King Street from my home, but most of his major works are in big museums elsewhere. But, frankly, Lancaster never understood him (his sexual preferences were open to question) and still doesn't.

They powers that be have been trying to build something around Thaddeus Stevens, in part because they discovered the block they were going to tear down to build the convention center includes his home. A non-descript building, but the preservationists squawked, and now the county smells grant money and tourist dollars connected to our supposed reverence for abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, etc.

None of this has anything to do with the Seventh Ward. None of the convention center is there, none of the historic property is there (except Buchanan's grave). If we get anything out of the rebirth of Lancaster, it's likely to be that all the undesirable businesses -- bars, liquor stores, minority businesses -- will be shoveled down our way, safely out of sight of the convention center people.