Jul. 9--NEWPORT NEWS -- Jessie Walters remembers the simple pleasures Jefferson Avenue had for people in the southeast community more than 50 years ago.

Two hot dogs and a soda for a quarter.

Colorful and customer-luring storefronts along the avenue.

Christmas lights dazzling with the glitter of the holidays.

"This was nice scenery," said Walters, who was born and raised in southeast Newport News and now lives in the Section 8 housing complex Aqua Vista. "These were nice times."

Today, with its boarded-up shops and faded brick buildings, Jefferson Avenue from 25th to 36th streets is a far cry from the vibrant and bustling community it used to be.

And for Walters, who cleans and waxes cars for a living, a new southeast can't come fast enough.

From the soothing shade of the last remaining furniture store on this lower stretch of Jefferson Avenue, he ponders what it would take to breathe new life into the community.

"It would take a lot of cleaning up," Walters said. "But it's possible."

The Newport News City Council shares his vision.

This spring, council members received a first official look at the city's ambitious plan to revive 25th to 36th streets and turn the 11 blocks into an attractive gateway into the southeast community.

The so-called Jefferson Avenue Corridor Study envisions a mixed-use development with retail shops and apartments, including revived and once-again polished business facades.

The study also recommends lining lower Jefferson Avenue with trees and vintage streetlights to return the area to its traditional and pedestrian-friendly Main Street feel. To do that, the low-hanging and unsightly overhead power lines would be buried underground.

The study would also include pursuing official historic designations for eligible buildings.

Making lower Jefferson Avenue more appealing is part of the city's overarching ambition to revitalize the area, to develop the southeast community's two-mile waterfront and to plow ahead with a multimillion-dollar, 14-acre project near Terminal Avenue proposed by former NFL star Aaron Brooks, a Newport News native.

But Vernard Lynch -- a barber who has cut a lot of hair, trimmed a lot of beards and shined many bald heads in his shop off Jefferson Avenue on 25th Street since 1958 -- has heard it all before.

"Studies, studies, studies," he murmurs under his breath one day in his barbershop, attacking with his humming electric razor the mustache of a longtime customer.

When Lynch started learning to cut hair in the 1950s, the area around his shop -- referred to by locals as "2, 5 and J" -- was packed with places to eat.