At the stroke of the new year Hogmanay in Scotland - Glasgow will erupt in a mammoth fireworks and laser display to launch a year-long arts and sports extravaganza.
Scotland's biggest city, which a few years ago evoked images of slums, poverty and violence, will become "Cultural Capital of Europe" for 1990.Glasgow beat out eight other British cities for the title, devised in 1984 by European Community culture ministers and held previously by Athens, Florence, Amsterdam, West Berlin and Paris.
"What we are set to celebrate is the culture of our city and region, its individuality, its vigor ... not just the culture to be seen in a gallery or bought with a theater ticket, but what's around us in the streets and buildings ...," proclaims a brochure produced by Glasgow authorities.
Performers include Moscow's Bolshoi opera, Britain's National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company, and operatic superstars Luciano Pavarotti and Jessye Norman.
There will be exhibitions of Van Gogh, Pissarro and Degas. A new 2,500-seat concert hall will be opened. Many events will involve community groups from Glasgow's population of 715,000.
Sports highlights include the European Indoor Track Championships and the World Highland Games.
It is a big event for a town that a decade ago was physically and spiritually derelict, tied to the image of violence and religious bigotry amid dilapidated tenements portrayed in the best-selling novel "No Mean City," written in 1935 by natives Alexander MacArthur and H. Kingsley Long.
The city on the River Clyde had seen its preeminence in world shipbuilding end and its traditional heavy industry decline. Factories closed, unemployment soared, morale crashed.
"I arrived in a demoralized, down-at-the-heels town that seemed to be perched on the edge of the civilized world with every chance of falling into the abyss," Arnold Kemp, editor of the Glasgow Herald, who came here in 1981, wrote in an introduction to the paper's "Book of Glasgow."
"On every hand were reminders of lost greatness or an evaporated sense of community."
The 1980s have seen a transformation. Kemp describes Glasgow today as "a proud and perky city with ambition."
Local councils, given continuity by the Labor Party holding power for years, have poured money into regeneration.
New service and manufacturing industry has been brought to Glasgow. The Clydebank enterprise zone, occupying land once devoted to building great ships, houses more than 300 companies.
Some central government departments have been wooed to Glasgow. Office and hotel building is racing ahead.
Much prosperity has returned. Unemployment is falling, although at 17 percent it is still almost twice the national average.
The city center has been rejuvenated, pedestrian malls created, tenements restored and many magnificent 19th century buildings cleaned and refurbished.
The star is the massive City Chambers, a breathtaking testament to Victorian extravagance with its clusters of turrets and domes and, they say here, more marble than the Vatican.
The arts, too, have thrived. Glasgow boasts 17 museums, 25 art galleries and nine theaters and the city council spends about $30 million a year on the arts.
Perhaps the greatest single coup was the opening in 1983 of the Burrell collection, a world-renowned display of art through the ages collected by William Burrell, a Glasgow ship owner.
The Glasgow 1990 festival will cost some $75 million to stage, the money coming mainly from the city and regional councils, backed by commercial sponsors.
The organizers hope 10 million visitors may visit the city during the year and stress the festival should have an economic, social and cultural impact beyond 1990.
Jim Waugh, a spokesman for the Festivals Office, emphasized the role to be played by community arts groups alongside the international stars.
A "people's choir," being created to perform at the New Year's launch party, is expected to have 10,000 members by later in 1990.
Ceramic artists are working with mentally handicapped people to create an exhibition. Children attending a dental clinic are painting a giant mural.
"We want real participation to get the best possible statement from the communities of what they can do," said Waugh. He conceded, however, that there were critics who disapproved of Glasgow 1990.
"They see it as a sort of cultural colonization, an imposition," he said. "But there is great achievement in bringing all this to one city in one year. If anyone thinks it is not a good idea, their thinking is questionable."
Despite increased prosperity and urban renewal, the feeling remains that parts of Glasgow will not be touched by the spirit of 1990.
Bleak housing projects - put up, unplanned, around the city to meet a desperate post-war housing shortage - are still nests of poverty, unemployment, violence and drug abuse.
The idea of "Glasgow, Cultural Capital of Europe," may ring false in Easterhouse, a section of the city with 44,000 residents but not even a movie theater. But there is enthusiasm for 1990 at most levels.
"It's really quite exciting," said a taxi driver. "We seem to have been stuck with this 'No Mean City' image forever. But this is a generous place and, if the 1990 festival brings people to Glasgow, the people of Glasgow will win them over and they'll want to come back."
A hotel receptionist echoed the feeling: "Glasgow's really moving nowadays and 1990 will give people a real chance to take a pride in their city."