SALEM — The contractors started filing into the meeting room early last Wednesday morning. In all, more than a dozen came to the City Hall annex on Washington Street to hear details of the South River Harborwalk.

"There's obviously a lot of interest," said City Planner Lynn Duncan, whose office has handed out almost 30 bid packets.

The harborwalk plan is a bold one: a 1,000-foot wood and concrete walkway through one of the most neglected, unsightly and troublesome areas of the city.

The South River basin, which runs between the Congress Street bridge and Lafayette Street, is an area often strewn with trash and broken liquor bottles. It is where, in recent years, a young restaurant worker drowned late at night, and where a homeless woman was pulled to safety after toppling into the basin.

Annually, the Salem Harbor Station power plant sends over a crew to pull shopping carts and other debris from the waterway.

"It's kind of a forgotten area," said Lucy Corchado, president of The Point Neighborhood Association.

This project is all about vision, officials say: swapping that vision for a new one. Someday, they see the South River ringed with a walkway, dotted with flagpoles and granite benches, and lined with docks where small boats pull up to waterfront restaurants. This, they say, is a first step.

"Every little bit we do all adds up," said Fred Atkins, who chaired the South River Harborwalk Committee.

The harborwalk is one of the key pieces of a Salem Harbor Plan drafted about a decade ago. After several false starts and numerous delays, the first phase of this project is ready to go.

"We're pretty excited," Duncan said. "This has been a long time coming."

That's an understatement.

This project has been so slow to take shape that negotiations between the city and Massachusetts Electric Co., which has a substation along the walkway, were underway when Duncan arrived here five years ago.

"They obviously had concerns about their ongoing operations," she said.

In what officials see as a major concession, Mass Electric has agreed to remove barbed wire from a section of its substation wall. As it passes this property, the walkway will be built on pilings over the water.

The harborwalk will accomplish several goals, officials said. It will connect the downtown to the waterfront, and it will complement a new park under construction on Peabody Street, linking residents in a low-income neighborhood to both the downtown and the harbor.

Creation of the Peabody Street park has been delayed while soil laced with asbestos is being removed. That work should be done by the end of the month.

Construction of the harborwalk is scheduled to begin by late summer and be completed next year.

The 10-foot-wide walkway will have an entrance plaza on Derby Street, next to the Beverly Co-Operative Bank, with granite benches and a flagpole. Three interpretive signs, with photos and maps, will tell the story of the South River area, part of Salem's shipping history.

"There were all sorts of wharves on that stretch," said Jim McAllister, a local historian who worked on the project.

The South River Harborwalk, ultimately, is part of a bigger puzzle.

"The vision is to create a continuous walkway ... all the way from the Forest River to Winter Island and the Willows," said Duncan. "It's a big vision. ... You try to do pieces. This is the first piece."

Bids are due July 15.