The tour of the city on the brink of a renaissance starts with an apology, a couple of questions traded back and forth, a cocaine reference and an expletive used as a verb by Bridgeport's Everyman.

You can tell it's Mayor John Fabrizi in the big black SUV, but even if you're not sure, the vehicle's police package, with the official blue-flashing lights on the grille, are a dead giveaway.

He turns off the flashers and rolls down the window, expelling a wisp of a Kool into the early evening air. "I'm sorry I'm late."

"No big deal. It's a warm night."

"I know I have to get you back here by 6, so, where do you wanna go?"

"What dah yah mean?" the reporter replies, then waits a beat as he climbs into the black behemoth.

He smiles, looking Fabrizi in the eyes. "I thought we were gonna score some lines."

The mayor's appropriate, two-word reply thoroughly breaks the ice and kicks off a frenetic hour-long tour of the city he loves and hopes will forgive and redeem him.

There's something to point out in every block, from the new energy-efficient street lamps by Connecticut Beardsley Zoo, to the renovation of old brick buildings along hard-scrabble East Main Street, to a reenactment of "CSI Bridgeport" and finally a star turn among the dark courtyards of the P.T. Barnum Apartments.

The year 2006 is about a week from dying away and Fabrizi, implicated this year in some FBI testimony about his cocaine proclivities, has every reason to be eager for 2007.

And he's

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in the driver's seat both figuratively and symbolically as the city's a real-estate deal away from finally moving ahead on the Steel Point peninsula project, 50 acres of prime land on the harbor. Although the General Assembly first approved funding for the development in 1998, it still has the over-grown, bombed-out qualities of a bad science fiction movie.

We're driving south on East Main Street, heading for Steel Point, when traffic slows and Fabrizi stops in front of St. Charles Roman Catholic Church. A good politician, who's going to heavily depend on his personal skills if he's to win reelection next November, the mayor stops and lets a short woman cross the road.

"How yah doing?" he yells, waving to the woman, who recognizes him and waves back. The new moon is slowly heading for the horizon over Ogden Street.

"The farther you go down East Main Street, the better it looks," he says, pointing out a two-acre site next to Hall Neighborhood House, a renovation of a four-story brick tenement by Steuben Street.

The police radio is crackling as he lights another Kool, supposedly the lone remnant of his bad-old days, before the FBI wiretaps were revealed, before he admitted to using coke while in office, before the diabetes was diagnosed, before he stopped drinking.

"Fabrizi!" someone yells from the sidewalk, the first of maybe 20 such hailings.

We're driving into the desolation of Steel Point as Fabrizi recalls his "CSI Bridgeport" moment a few weeks ago, when he stumbled into a Stratford handyman who allegedly decided to save himself disposal fees and instead unloaded a torn-up roof down here on the waterfront.

"I told DPW to relock this gate," Fabrizi says, tooling into the scene of the crime: a gnarly, 4-foot-high pile of black-plastic bags and asphalt roof shingles, which he matched to those found in a nice little, nearly new red dump truck that's impounded behind the Golden Hill Street police station.

He's not happy with the open chain-link gate or flaking paint on the sign under I-95 at Kossuth Street, but Fabrizi obviously enjoys the role of being Bridgeport's leader.

He believes the Democratic Town Committee will endorse him for another term, so the only thing left is to convince the skeptics, make some big progress for taxpayers/voters and defeat potential challengers.

"My new strategy, come the first of the year, is to get my butt into the streets ten fold," he says as we swing by the Majestic and Poli Theaters, the pigeon-stained, cavernous mausoleums on Main Street.

Over at P.T. Barnum, the huge SUV dodges slowly, in and out of dark alleys.

Kids walk over slowly as Fabrizi says hello. At the bright island known as the Mini-Mart Market, Fabrizi parks, leaves the engine running and greets a half dozen young men as he walks in for matches for the filter kings.

He gets back in the car and drives away amid a departing chorus of "Fabrizi." He hits the blue strobes again at a small gathering of a dozen people, opening the window to exchange brief holiday greetings.

He looks over before lighting another Kool. "I thank God because I think He's giving me an extra gift," Fabrizi says.

It's about 30 hours from Christmas, the mayor's 50th birthday. It seems as if every other house on State Street has holiday lights ablaze, a sign that people are vested in their neighborhoods.

On the police frequencies, a little peace on earth is reigning. Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in the Connecticut Post. You may reach him in the Capitol at (860) 549-4670 or e-mail him at kdixon@ctpost.com.