By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Curiously, after a decade of failed dreams, the chances of a Bremerton renaissance appear to be improving, and it has everybody talking.

"It's exciting, almost too good to be true," warbles Diane Robinson, a former TV news reporter who now operates the gift shop at family-owned Elandan Gardens, south across Sinclair Inlet from downtown.

The target of Robinson's attention is an idea promoters refer to as Sinclair Landing, a privately financed renovation of 11 downtown blocks, including a quarter-mile of waterfront.

The area would be transformed into a shopping and entertainment magnet expected to draw thousands of people, principally ferry-riding tourists from the metropolitan east side of Puget Sound.

The Welches' upholstery shop is among the 90 properties on the promoters' hit list.

"If they want it, they can have it -- for the right price," Welch says.

While the project has yet to attract the required private capital, two public pieces of an overall community improvement plan already are taking shape with local, state and federal funding.

One will be a tree-lined boulevard to replace the awkward collection of streets that get you -- without much grace -- from the state ferry dock west out of town. Its status: The city is acquiring property.

Cranes and crews already are at work on the other piece: a new ferry terminal. This two-story transportation center is expected to better manage waiting motor vehicles and to improve the way foot passengers connect with Kitsap Transit buses. Status: Completion in 1999.

Important to this connector are two high-speed, passenger-only boats able to trim the ride between Bremerton and Seattle from an hour to 30 minutes. The first of these $9.5 million watercraft, the M/V Chinook, was inaugurated in June. The other is expected in service by September 1999.

Overall, Bremerton's face lift would cost an estimated $400 million. But it's about time someone did something, says Silverdale resident Rick Leenstra, member of the Bremerton Chamber of Commerce and sharp-tongued critic of downtown revitalization efforts.

In an recent paper outlining challenges to Bremerton's status as a Navy home port, Leenstra says, "by any measure, this area is dirty, dilapidated and almost totally devoid of positive entertainment opportunities." And he wondered why the Navy would ever choose it as a home port.

Not surprisingly, Leenstra is a Sinclair Landing booster and a partner in the group attempting to finance the project.

Thoughts of improving job opportunities are music to the ears of fry-cook Hardin, who toils daily behind the long lunch counter in the F.W. Woolworth building at the corner of Burwell Street and Pacific Avenue.

Vacant since Woolworth shuttered the place years ago, the building was revived earlier this year by shipyard inspector Jerry Palmer. Now it's an antique market, lunch counter, cleaners and tea shop, and has been rechristened Old Wooly's.

As one of his beef patties sizzled on the grill, Hardin told how he and his wife, Jeannie, came west from Illinois, liked what they found in Bremerton and settled in, eventually having a daughter, now 11 months old and the light of their lives.

"She's a doll," he says. "One cool kid."

Hardin finds time to lend his cooking talents to The Lord's Neighborhood Diner, a weekend soup kitchen run by retired social worker Delsie Peebles at the nearby Neighborhood Christian Center.

"There are a lot of people out of work here and their welfare checks just don't take them to the end of the month," he says. "We wanted to do something."

A program that fed 35 people a month when it opened in October, now feeds 1,200 a month between 3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday.