Boston’s Downtown Crossing is a lot of things, and if we’re being honest, most of them aren’t very favorable.

The area is a tad gritty, though it is improving. It’s dirty. It gives off more than a slight air of desperation and decline. At certain times and on certain corners, it can be dangerous. It attracts an undeniable vagrant element. Sometimes, it smells downright awful.

It is an area rife with vacant storefronts and bombed-out craters of developments that never were, a place that’s home to the homeless, transients and innumerable pieces of wind-blown litter.

It is also an area whose vitality to the city of Boston is almost impossible to overstate.

There is a reason the area is called Downtown Crossing, after all. It is the center hub off of which a half dozen unique, dynamic neighborhoods sprout like spokes on an urban wheel. It touches Beacon Hill, the Financial District, Chinatown, pieces of the Bulfinch Triangle/West End/North End borders and – if we’re being charitable – serves as a gateway to the nascent Seaport/Innovation District.

If the small area that is Downtown Crossing itself isn’t exactly experiencing its finest days, there can be no doubt that the surrounding neighborhoods it serves all have been, are, and/or will be critical to the city’s continued growth and prosperity. As such, Downtown Crossing is just as critical.

Which is why, despite its too-obvious shortcomings, the area is still attractive to developers and entrepreneurs. Whether positive or negative, the dense collection of side streets and thoroughfares has an undeniable energy. It is alive, and it is that inherent vitality that will continue to attract savvy businesspeople.

Besides, its shortcomings are not entirely unbalanced by positives. Because of its proximity to so many neighborhoods and its array of public transportation options, the area’s foot traffic is enough to set any retailer’s tongue wagging.

And those developers seeking to corral that foot traffic by making the neighborhood stickier through new residences, hotels and restaurants can’t be blamed either. Beyond the mere crossing point it has become, the area has been – and can be again – a destination in its own right.

And, believe it or not, it’s is getting there. Slowly but surely, in fits and starts. Yes, there does seem to be a step backward for every two forward, but progress is being made.

As we wrote in this issue, major apartment and mixed-use projects are planned or underway in the area, local and national investors are scooping up properties, and retailers and restaurants now occupy more than 250,000 square feet of retail space that lay vacant four years ago.

City officials have spent much of the past few years touting the strengths and advantages of Boston’s other neighborhoods – the newly opened-up Greenway, a suddenly resurgent Back Bay and most notably the South Boston Innovation District.

But they’ve never forgotten about the central district that largely makes the rest go. Mayor Thomas Menino has been a loud champion of Downtown Crossing, launching the city’s first Business Improvement District in the area and not hesitating to get in the face of those developers who would have abandoned the wounded neighborhood altogether a few years ago.

And those efforts are starting to bear fruit. The changes are perhaps more incremental than the almost daily progress seen in the Seaport, but they have an equal momentum.

And we think that momentum will, one day soon we hope, be enough to tilt that list of things that Downtown Crossing is into the overwhelmingly positive.