RALEIGH - It was a lunchtime spectacle for almost 15 years: two men bent over a chessboard, talking junk, sliding bishops, toppling kings and shaking hands.

Back in the early '90s, Fayetteville Street was a lonely pedestrian mall, except at 1 p.m., when the air was loud with hands slapping chess clocks and pawns clinking on stone tables. Squint a little and it looked like Greenwich Village.

Now those tables sit piled in a maintenance yard, waiting for Fayetteville Street's makeover. But they come back next spring after four years in exile, and the old-time players promise that's when downtown Raleigh will see some real revival.

"It will ignite this street," says Sherman Leathers, widely known as Raleigh's chess sheriff. "It's such a fellowship. We get judges to play. We get engineers to play. We get Shaw University students to play. You can see what's going on in their mind by what's on the board."

Raleigh tore out its pedestrian mall in 2005, building two lanes of traffic, blowing up the crumbling old convention center and praying for new life -- or at least a successful new center with a $221 million price tag.

Since then, the chess players have migrated to Kiwanis Park for Friday night games, watching downtown experiments tank on their old turf.

The city scrapped Spanish artist Jaume Plensa's electric sculpture before a single shovel of dirt got turned. Then Yancy's fancy jazz and Cajun restaurant, with its flat-screen televisions in the restrooms, closed after a year in business.

Now Raleigh's attention returns to the humble chessboard.

Any big city has outdoor tables where hustlers and undiscovered geniuses play: Washington Square in New York; North Shore Beach in Chicago; Dupont Circle in Washington.

This isn't the slow, brooding variety but rigidly timed, 10-minute speed games, punctuated by hands slapping clocks between turns.

"You get five minutes a side," Leathers said. "White says, 'I can beat you in five minutes.' Black says, 'Time will tell.' "

A parade of playas

Raleigh's version of the urban chess arena covered only a block outside the Sir Walter Apartments, but it drew big-city characters.

Leathers, now 71, would stride down the street, pull his pieces out of a maroon satchel and announce, "There's a new sheriff in town."

He would play with a damp towel over his head, or under a black umbrella to shield him from the sun. Once, he fashioned his own set of chess pieces out of toggle bolts, bending the head to make a knight.

Players would drift down from Progress Energy and the Wake County Courthouse. Grand masters discovered the daily downtown games, and they swatted away opponents like a queen takes a pawn.

Keith Simmons remembers the scene from his days as an illustrator at The News & Observer.

"You would have some guys that talked junk the whole time they were playing, much like a street basketball pickup game," he wrote from Washington. "Sometimes I would play with my fingers in my ears so I wouldn't have to listen ... 'Keith, my game is so strong! Keith, what you got? You got nothin'. You know I'm a playa. My game is so strong!' "

Just this week, Leathers drew a crowd on Fayetteville Street when he sat down on a stone block to play with Luis Guzman, president of the Raleigh Chess Club.

"I started reading some chess books because my father played, and I wanted to get closer to my father," Guzman said. "After reading the books, I was beating my father. But I had to read a lot more to beat Sherman. It took me six months to beat him."

As they played, barbers stood outside their shop to watch, and construction workers paused. Everyone who passed mentioned playing chess once as a kid, to which Leathers said, "Come play again."

Chess is life, he explains, sweet but bittersweet. Sit down for an hour, and he'll prove it.