When it comes to defending former Mayor Marion Barry, I had felt the deadline was still far off. But this winter, with Barry clearly unraveling before our eyes, it’s time to remember the good, nearly great things that this unique and reckless man has done for the city.

You could put it in the terms of historic preservation. Barry is like a crumbling but spectacular building; rather than tear it down, we should remember and celebrate its part in city history.

Add up the incredible grocery-robbery story, with the former mayor (in his own mind) betrayed by hustlers and stickup men, whom he basically loved. There was an unwritten code, he said, because he was their friend, that they would not victimize him. Pile on the remarkable nonfunctioning trash-to-energy machine, the tax evasion with sentencing in a week, the trips to hospital for exhaustion, the frequent absences from duty as Ward 8’s city councilman — and you have a picture of a man in free fall.

Let’s not even detail misdeeds of the “night owl,” the “situational” fiscal policies, the scapegrace cronies, the women. Nor the shameful patronizing (at least in the early years of the ’71-’99 reign of the “mayor for life”) by that alleged watchdog, The Washington Post, while Barry ran the city broke and actively promoted race-baiting themes such as “the plan” and “them and us.” The city still suffers from his hiring of thousands of lackluster bureaucrats and from the frightening surge in crime and drugs under his administrations.

Those who remember Barry on the rise see differently. They remember the sparkling speaker who genuinely cared for people who were disregarded and pushed around by police and the ruling cadre of older white men, the D.C. commissioners. They remember the Dashiki, the marches, the protests, Barry the firebrand of the school board, a man who built his political base on black pride and the demand for jobs.

It was those two, the pride and the belief that a job was almost a right for D.C. citizens, that won allegiance of the thousands. For above all, Barry was concrete, down-to-earth — “in your face,” as they used to say. He promised jobs and he gave them, making the public schools, the University of D.C., the Department of Recreation and others into job banks. The model was Barry’s famous summer jobs program, a pure giveaway. At the height of his hiring, close to 40,000 were onboard, about one-third more than required.

But when he came to the Hill to face questions from Congress, from the chairmen of the House District Committee, Barry was at his most effective and shameless — and most endearing to his political base. He made few concessions, made few promises to cut back, and instead voiced the ever-smoldering threat of those years, that unless the city got the funds it needed, it would be another “long, hot summer.”

By whatever means, Barry achieved one goal. He created a black middle class like that of no other city. And he drew world attention to his creation. In Washington, that class ran things and Barry was a national symbol of black mastery. When the Washingtonian magazine (which has overwhelmingly white readership) ran a cover picture showing two scoops of chocolate ice cream on top of one of vanilla and the line “Chocolate City,” it was like homecoming for his grand ideas.

Much good came along with the vast expenditures and the inevitable miniscandals of a bloated, under-employed bunch of paper shufflers. The jobholders and their sons and daughters became solid middle-class taxpayers. Barry mistook one thing — he meant to cement his own political base with D.C. jobholder voters, but his lament in his last years was that his people took the money and ran — to the suburbs. Such a mass of city employees left for Prince George’s County (Barry’s estimate was 70 percent) that it became known as “Ward 9.”

And good came at last through Barry’s reckless finances, that put salaries in front of almost anything else. The chaos finally roused Congress, which installed a control board and stripped most of Barry’s powers. Mayor Anthony Williams was the logical extension and the reaction to the Barry years. The irony is, of course, that Congress always had complete power and oversight of D.C. finances, and always failed to exercise it, mostly because of Barry’s courage and personal charm, his refusal to cower and the veiled threat of urban unrest.

The common perception is that the control board righted the ship that Barry had overloaded and steered astray. The question is, would they have done it without Barry and his unique gift of drawing attention to himself and the city? I doubt it.

Through it all, Barry enriched his cronies, his constituents, everyone but himself, to the lasting shame of the smooth men in good suits who preyed on his goodwill and got themselves rich. For him there was to be no soft landing, no comfortable university tenure, no stocks and bonds. He ran for Ward 8 because he needed the money.

Least careful of men, Barry used only the flimsiest excuses — “my redemption,” etc. — when he was embarrassed by his excesses. He seemed not really to care about his public image; his private life was distressingly public. Yet he was and is able to maintain the goodwill of many voters; even in this time of clear diminishment, he was able to hurl a populist wrench into the plans of the baseball developers, making himself and his unique but outdated brand of politics the center of attention.

Attention came again last week, in an empty hallway in Anacostia, but to an old man with his bag of groceries. Youthful thugs, the indulged wastrels he had always championed, held a gun; he looked like nobody, an easy mark.

The real deal in the Howard-D.C. pact to build a $424 million medical center in place of D.C. General Hospital is this: Howard gets to dump its money-losing University Hospital ($17 million in the red last year) into the new facility, where someone else will pick up the inevitable deficits. D.C. politicians get the chance to promise great healthcare benefits without having to deliver a thing except words.

Even though local citizens and most civic organizations are against the deal (and by default in favor of strengthening a network of local clinics for immediate health needs), it seems to be going ahead like a sleepwalker, led by City Administrator Robert Bobb.

Whether the city can afford to build this hospital while other vast projects, such as the stadium, Convention Center hotel and others, go forward is academic, for the hospital above all things is a political animal.

Consider: Seven of the 13 City Council members are running either for reelection or for higher office; the “National Capital Medical Center” (NCMC) will not be up and running until 2009, perfect fodder for empty promises on the stump.

• Bobb, the heavyweight carrying the ball for the hospital, is a Williams appointee and likely to leave with the Williams team next year.

• Mayor Anthony Williams himself suffered great political damage getting rid of a hospital called D.C. General. He’s now backing another hospital in the same place.

• Howard and D.C., according to the recent agreement, will not be responsible for bailing out NCMC after the first three years. That job is left to an unformed nonprofit corporation, which should right now be dubbed “Uncle Sugar.”

• Howard, which announced layoffs of 125 workers at its historic University Hospital, is turning over that entity to the same nonprofit organization, presumably thereby freeing its regular annual (and unique) federal subsidy of $30 million for other purposes.

• There’s nothing in the new agreement about the down-to-earth problem of District healthcare: that some 70,000 residents are without insurance, and they mostly live east of Rock Creek Park, and they will come in numbers to the emergency room of the new 250-bed hospital because that is what they have done in the past for anything from a nosebleed to a brain injury.

• The NCMC will eliminate, experts say, any chance of Greater Southeast Hospital’s financial viability, hinting of the nightmare of not one but two public hospitals asking for perpetual handouts.

• Preservation halfway measures are going on at the famed Old Navy Hospital at 921 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., where contractors are using up a $400,000 fund from the Office of Property Management to repair the south portico, while $6 million is needed for a real rehab. ...

• Street sweeping, and therefore unwanted tickets, is halted until March 17 on Hill streets — but not major avenues. ...

• Dick Wolf, veteran of many Hill development battles (and now once more president of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society), is ringing alarm bells loudly about massive PUD (planned-unit development) plans for Near Northeast at H and Second streets. He and others say the process bypasses normal zoning rules, allowing developers to “trade” scale for streetscape details. ...

• Zelda Fichandler, fabled founding director of the Hill’s Arena Stage, will warm up your winter with a rare return to duty as director of “Awake and Sing,” the tale of a New York Jewish family’s struggles and triumphs during the Great Depression. It’s running through March 3. ...

• Clever Hugh Kelly, the Hill real-estate agent who breaks most of the rules (Hugh used to walk ahead of the  meter maid at Eastern Market, foiling tickets with his own quarters), has found another way to keep his name out front: Kelly sent his client list (and many others) a fistful of 2-cent stamps (plus his business card, of course) to ease the postage price hike that went into effect Sunday. ...

• Carol Wright, who with husband John Wright runs the Eastern Market flea market, rules with an iron hand and a jet-black coif, according to a group of upstart vendors who question her management techniques (and have been complaining for years). Latest example going around the stalls: A vendor was forced to make a public apology to other vendors for showing up seven minutes late.