Close your eyes and put on your imagination caps for a moment — yes, you still have one, even if you haven’t dusted it off since kindergarten.

Hop in the car and let’s take a drive down Main Street in downtown Natchez.

For the sake of brevity, we won’t focus on all the great things happening in downtown, but let’s pay attention to the areas of opportunity.

We could easily find tons of great things to say about downtown merchants and developers working to keep things moving.

It’s difficult to see the diamonds in the rough around downtown as we rush around in everyday life. But with our imagination caps on, it’s easy to imagine — briefly — that time will stand still for us.

No other cars are on the roads. Just us, cruising around looking for things we’d improve if money were no object and we were in charge of the city.

Let’s start on Main Street by the fire station. As we accelerate toward Rankin Street, we stop at the ugly blight on the corner of Main and Rankin streets — the former First Baptist Church building.

It’s always struck me as sadly ironic that one of downtown’s most unkempt and dangerous looking buildings sits across the street from one of the city’s most beautiful public resources, Memorial Park.

A group of volunteers raised funds for years to help rejuvenate the park, most recently with the refurbishment of the fountain. The park is a mini oasis in downtown.

Yes, just across the street the crumbling old church building stands out as an eyesore — beauty and the beast, locked across from one another.

The church relocated more than 20 years ago to its beautiful new location on D’Evereux Drive.

But the current owners of the old building on Main Street seem to have done little to nothing secure the building, let alone repair it.

Looking at it from our car, we can see the front door isn’t secure, but that’s the least of the building’s problems. We can’t see it from here, but the roof has caved in, leaving a mess inside.

Why hasn’t the city moved out on condemning the property and getting something moving on it?

It seems long overdue.

As we continue on Main Street and look down the cross streets, here and there we see an occasional overhead utility line. Wouldn’t it be great if those all went away slowly in downtown?

Imagine how “clean” places like the House on Ellicott Hill would look without drooping power lines encasing it from Canal Street.

Let’s continue on down to the corner of Commerce and Main streets.

From here you can see what I refer to as the Dennis and Darby Short block. The retailing powerhouse has held together that block of Main for years and the work they’ve done on restoring the corner building is truly amazing.

But stop and look at the intersection for a minute.

What would it look like if each intersection had brick pavers marking the crosswalks and leading to the handicapped accessible sidewalks?

Looks sharp through our imagination. Now imagine city crews — yes, city crews — tending to plants, flowers and trees lining the streets.

Is it all just a dream? Perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be. If money were no object, we’d get it all done in the next few years.

But we don’t have the funds, the negative people would say.

But Natchez is a thriving city, with a good cash flow and wise management. Saying we cannot complete such improvements because of a lack of money is an excuse. Other cities, even some smaller than Natchez, have done it through hard work and sacrifice.

Our city deserves to have all of these things, and all it takes to get the ball rolling is some imagination and a collective spirit and desire.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.