Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's code enforcement sweep took to the streets of Larimer yesterday, where 11 high schoolers spent three weeks clearing weeds, large overgrowth and litter. They trailed behind and sometimes beside him, talking, laughing and high-fiving with him.

"I'm told you guys cleared that lot over there," he said, pointing at a battered, boarded-up brick home on Carver Street, its condition stark against a postage-stamp front lot and vacant side lot leveled to dirt.

"You couldn't even see the house," said one student, a participant in the Pittsburgh Summer Youth Employment Program.

"Looks good," said the mayor.

In the second of a series of neighborhood tours -- last week's was in Oakland; Allentown and California-Kirkbride are due to be scheduled -- the entourage of city officials, neighborhood advocates and teen workers stopped at falling-down buildings and vacant lots. One was a graveyard of children's play equipment being consumed by weeds beside a former day care home.

People on their porches waved and one adolescent boy appeared at the mayor's side, his head down and his arm out. The mayor shook his hand.

Ora Lee Carroll, Larimer's most enduring advocate, directed the group to follow the streets most crucial to development in a master plan the residents of Larimer are building with help from consultants.

"Just look around and you can see the needs of this neighborhood. We need support. We need all of you, not laughing at us but helping us in a meaningful way," Ms. Carroll said to the mayor.

East Liberty Development Inc., whose own master plan a decade ago helped guide the resurgence of that neighborhood's economy, is a partner in Larimer's master plan.

"The goal is to make what's happening on one side of East Liberty Boulevard match what's happening on the other side," said Nathan Wildfire, who is developing East Liberty Development's environmental initiatives.

As crews of fire and building inspectors fanned out to check properties for code violations, Mr. Ravenstahl and city department heads strolled and stopped, strolled and stopped.

"Find out who owns this," the mayor called to an assistant, pointing at a large lot someone suggested for a community garden.

From her home on Carver, Melrose Ottey came out to the sidewalk to ask for help obtaining a lot she has been mowing beside her driveway.

"It would be nice, yes ma'am," she said as Lauren Byrne, one of the mayor's neighborhood assistance staff, wrote her contact information.

At Larimer Avenue, Public Works Director Guy Costa recalled that a grocery store sat where a GTECH sign now introduces a field of sunflowers that the company planted to remediate the soil. "I grew up here, and there were lots of grocery stores and bakeries," he said.

Now, pervasive vacancy and "alarming" home ownership rates are what the city has to work with, the mayor said. "This is clearly a different neighborhood that isn't going to be what it was," he said. But it presents "an opportunity to bundle parcels that can be green spaces and urban gardens."

He said Larimer's collaboration with East Liberty Development and the Urban Redevelopment Authority "is very important, because the success we've seen in East Liberty will allow us to expand it into Larimer."

He thanked the crew from the city's youth employment program, telling them his office hopes to allocate more money to hire more students next year.

Before leaving for the day -- the work day is from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. -- Tearasha Higgs, 15, of Garfield, said, "I'm grateful for that, because if it weren't for this job, some of us would be outside, bored, probably causing trouble, or I would be in the house sleeping."