ANOTHER LASER shot into the goal by one of the Silvertips' young stars prompts thundering cheers from hockey fans savoring the sight inside the Everett Events Center.

The scene outside is just as sweet to local leaders who believed in the arena's potential to rekindle downtown Everett. Before and after hockey games, crowds stroll surrounding streets and fill restaurants and bars. Nearby parking lots and garages make a good night's business charging $5 or $10 a car.

"Most of that would have gone to Seattle before," says Lanie McMullin, the city of Everett's executive director for economic development. "We needed to do something to change the image of Everett."

That's happened, at least partially. Three-and-a-half years after the Events Center opened and gave people a big reason to come to downtown Everett after dark, the city's looking to its next grand steps.

Meanwhile, the center's become a model for other cities looking to build arenas, including Kent. That south King County city is pondering the addition of a 6,500-seat facility that also would host hockey and myriad other happenings.

HALF A MILLION
Last year, Western Hockey League home games, concerts, trade shows and conferences brought about 579,000 people into the Everett Events Center. That's without the tens of thousands who come to the facility's community skating rink.

Some of those people undoubtedly get back into their cars and get back on nearby I-5 without spending an extra five minutes in Everett. Many others, however, have ended up in places like Papi's Pizza.

Ken Schoener owns the pizzeria, just a few hundred feet away from the Events Center's front door along Hewitt Avenue, downtown's most impressive east-west thoroughfare. Red Sox memorabilia dominate the eatery's historic brick walls, and New England native Schoener serves his pies with crisp, thin crusts.

"On event nights, the place is filled up from 5 or 5:30 p.m. till the event kicks off," says Schoener, a former state employee who also worked as a part-time security guard at the Events Center in its first year. "The drawback is lack of parking for the regulars on those nights."

Joel Starr, owner of The Flying Pig, a downtown casual dining spot, sees the same event-night rush hour there and at Tailgater Joe's, a sports bar he and business partners opened last year near the Events Center. But he points out that customers who drop in before a hockey game for the first time are potential regulars in the future. "That's what builds business," he says.

After the big rush, many of the restaurants empty out right as the hockey game or concert starts next door. With all the parking in the neighborhood filled and keeping other customers away, some just close early on those nights. It's the price of dealing with the fast ebb and flow.

"It's the good and the bad," says Schoener. Five, 10, 20 years ago, there was more bad than good along Hewitt Avenue and in downtown Everett in general. In the 1970s, the new Everett Mall in the city's south end, growing suburban development and the Boeing Co.'s legendary slump combined to empty out downtown Everett. Banks and professional offices stayed, but that created mostly empty streets after 5 p.m. Bars replaced restaurants, and storefronts stayed vacant despite numerous efforts to boost the district.

"I remember, when I opened, you could shoot a cannon down the street at 5 or 6 at night and not hit anyone," says Starr, who launched The Flying Pig a decade ago. While Everett's theaters and performing arts gained strength in the late 1990s, that usually brought hundreds, but not thousands, a few nights a month.

By the latest turn of the decade, the city of 100,000 people - once nicknamed "Milltown" for its forest of lumber mill smokestacks - was ready to do something big.

"Not only did it have a bad self-image, but the image of Everett around the Sound was 20 years old," McMullin says.

In early 2000, word got out that the city was considering a new arena. The fierce public fracas that followed lasted two years, with complaints about the century-old buildings that were to be sacrificed and the look of the new building, which includes 200-foot-tall masts that evoke the port city's past. Critics feared the facility would quickly become a $70 million-plus white elephant. Others decried the strategy of attracting "culture-less" hockey fans into downtown.

A FRESH START
Before the city settled on the busy corner of Hewitt and Broadway, in the heart of downtown, some called for it to be built farther toward Everett's edges.

"It would have been counterproductive," says Karen Shaw, who also works on economic development for the city. "We needed a catalyst there to drive footprints down the streets."

Sitting inside Papi's, Schoener is blunt about his former visits to Everett from his nearby home in Lake Stevens. His daughter was born downtown and he had one or two favorite eateries he'd occasionally stop for, but that was it. He had no other reason to frequent Everett.

McMullin says surveys showed huge amounts of money leaving the city. "People from inside our city limits were going to Seattle all the time to spend those discretionary leisure dollars. We had a lot of leakage economically."

All that and the state's offer to refund local sales taxes if they were spent on certain types of buildings, such as arenas, convinced city leaders to move ahead, even after Boeing staggered in 2001 and began huge layoffs at its Everett assembly plant. The then-owner of the Seattle Thunderbirds, Bill Yuill, gave up ownership of that team to start fresh 20 miles to the north.

At about the same time, the city of Everett gave Hewitt Avenue itself a makeover, creating wide sidewalks, planted medians and touches such as classier light poles. Public art began gracing downtown's corners. Preceding the projects was the construction of Everett Station, the city's new bus and train hub just east of central downtown.

The Everett Events Center opened just in time for the kickoff of the 2003-2004 WHL season, when the Everett Silvertips shocked the rest of the league by getting to the championship finals before succumbing.

In the seasons since, the team has consistently been near the top of the league. No doubt this helped to keep people in their seats once the novelty wore off. This year, the Silvertips have more than 4,000 season ticket holders and the team averages a paid attendance of more than 5,500 a game.

"It's been great. The fans keep on coming," says Keith Gerhart, public relations director and play-by-play broadcaster for the Silvertips. "They're more knowledgeable now, but they're still cheering as loud as they can."Gerhart, who's visited every arena in the WHL with the Silvertips, says the Everett Events Center is one of the premier venues he's seen.

A GOOD START
Other sports franchises are trying to replicate Everett's success. A league football team, owned by former Seattle Seahawk Sam Adams, has played in the Events Center the past two seasons. And this spring, the new Everett Explosion basketball team will debut in the International Basketball League. Meanwhile, the arena has hosted a growing number of Disney on Ice shows, indoor spectacles and concerts with progressively bigger headliners.

"We have a long way to go, but we have a good start,"says Kim Bedier, general manager with Global Spectrum, which runs the center's day-to-day operations.

The center's magnet effect on local residents is mentioned by everybody. Many come from suburban Arlington, Snohomish and Lake Stevens, people who formerly would drive past on their way to Seattle events.

"I was talking to someone who's in Woodinville. She and her friends would rather come up to an event in Everett than drive down to downtown Seattle," Bedier says. "Five years ago, she said she and her friends had never been to Everett."

Similarly, City Hall's Shaw says friends from east King County scoffed at first at the notion of coming to Everett for a concert. Then they came and found the city's old reputation is out of date.

Now that there's more to do in central Everett, the dream of luring more people into living in downtown condominiums and apartments is attainable. Construction on a $400 million public-private redevelopment of the Port of Everett's waterfront began late last year, with the first expensive view condos along Puget Sound scheduled to be ready within two years. The city is also developing wide-ranging plans for Everett's riverfront along the Snohomish River.

With a newly approved downtown master zoning plan in place, private developers are applying to build more mixed-use buildings. Those include a 19-story high-rise with office space, residential units and retail storefronts. Starr, who's also a board member of the Downtown Everett Association, openly encourages more eateries to take root.

The change downtown isn't complete. There are still rough edges, even on the well-trafficked Hewitt Avenue. Schoener made the 11 o'clock news last year when he got fed up with alleged drug dealing in the apartment above his business. He hung a giant banner on the building to shame them. Still, he's a believer in the Events Center's role as a catalyst for change.

"The new businesses spark growth in the immediate area, more policing has come, and I think it's really brought the Everett community together. It's a great place."

That's what Kent officials hope to be able to say by late 2008, says John Hodgson, that city's chief administrative officer. He's among those from the area who've visited the Everett Events Center and talked with Bedier and others in Everett.

TAKING IT SOUTH
"It's a little bigger than what we're planning in terms of the arena seating, but we were very impressed with the facility," Hodgson says. Kent, which arguably had image problems - at least to outsiders - for years, has revitalized its downtown. The centerpiece is Kent Station, an open-air village of shopping, restaurants and a community college branch campus. An events center would add to the momentum already created there, Hodgson says.

And the city already has an anchor tenant for the new arena in mind. The WHL's Seattle Thunderbirds, which played in recent years to a few thousand in KeyArena, have preliminarily agreed to move to Kent's facility. The city is scheduled to make its final decision on the arena this spring after learning more about the projected costs. The city thinks it can do it for less than $60 million.

Like Everett's center, Kent's could be paid for through public bonds that are paid back as the facility makes money. Unlike the hugely expensive personal playhouses for major league teams, Hodgson says Everett shows that events centers can make a demonstrable difference, both economically and entertainment-wise, to a midsize city.

Bedier admittedly is unsure how she feels about more competition in the region for hosting concerts, but she hopes Kent is able to succeed with its plans. The Everett center is working to attract more events and keep annual attendance growing, but she's happy with its short history to date. For many people, she says, the Events Center has put Everett on the map.

"It's given the entire city of Everett and the residents here reason to stand up straight and puff out their chests."

Eric Fetters-Walp of Lake Stevens is an area journalist.