In the case of the Adventists in Carrefour, more than 2,000 children attend a cluster of Adventist schools - primary through university level - that sit on a sprawling campus of palm trees and tidy white buildings perched on a hilltop.

Then the company moved its headquarters in a completely new, 35.000 square meters factory with a tidy two-storey building in Kippenheim, Wilhelm-Franz-Strasse 1.

Mr. Drljaca began the tour by showing a tidy building where he claimed prisoners had been held.

Her father, who is also a Pentecostal minister, founded the First Pentecostal Church last year in a tidy concrete-block building two blocks from the Shelton Avenue shop.

Tribal leaders and other local authorities streamed into the Mosul Social Club, a tidy building in a residential neighborhood.

Ms. Harris, 70, who lives a few doors down in a tidy building, volunteers at a monthly movie night at a nearby elementary school, attends community meetings and wakes at 3 in the morning to chase drug dealers and their clients from her building.

The tidy one-story building near the Atlantic Ocean has fallen short on the federal yardstick every year, but Florida has given it an A for five years straight.

A shabby construction site occupies nearly an entire block; tidy residential buildings and a few factories modestly claim the remaining space.

Hartwig's school is in a tidy five-year-old building with a bright, well-stocked library and a front office that looks like the parlor of an upscale bed and breakfast.

Already, the tidy two-story building on Xinhe Street, a tree-lined lane that is transformed into an procession of open-air sidewalk restaurants at night, is too cramped for the bank.