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WASHINGTON — During the Jim Crow era, nine Southern Army bases were named for treasonous Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy. Now a commission established by Congress has suggested new names for the bases that “embody the best of the United States Army and America.”

Fort Bragg in North Carolina would be renamed Fort Liberty, if the recommendations are approved by Congress. The other bases would honor some of the Army’s most distinguished heroes. These are their stories:

Fort Johnson (Fort Polk, La.)Sgt. Henry Johnson

Pvt. Henry Johnson deployed to Europe during World War I in a storied Black regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. The U.S. armed forces were segregated, and the Hellfighters were not allowed to fight on the front lines with other American troops. Instead, the Black soldiers fought under the command of their French allies.

That put Private Johnson and his unit at the front lines, “against all odds — Black Americans wearing French uniforms,” in the predawn hours of May 15, 1918, as German troops swarmed his sentry post at the edge of the Argonne Forest, according to a biography provided by the naming commission.

Private Johnson threw grenades until he had no more left to throw. Then he fired his rifle until it jammed. Then he clubbed enemy soldiers with the butt of his rifle until it split apart. Then he hacked away at the enemy with his bolo knife.

After the Germans retreated, daylight revealed that Private Johnson had killed four enemy soldiers and wounded an estimated 10 to 20. He suffered 21 wounds in combat.

For their actions, Private Johnson and his sentry-mate on duty that night were the first Americans to be awarded the Croix du Guerre, one of France’s highest military honors. Almost a century later, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Sergeant Johnson the Medal of Honor.

Fort Walker (Fort A.P. Hill, Va.)Dr. Mary Edwards Walker

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman ever awarded a Medal of Honor. A skilled surgeon, she volunteered during the Civil War because the Army refused to commission a woman as a medical officer.

She served near the front lines at Fredericksburg and Chattanooga, and routinely crossed battle lines to treat civilians. She was arrested by Confederate forces in 1864 and exchanged for a Confederate surgeon four months later. After she was denied an honorary military rank at the end of the war, Union generals successfully petitioned for her to receive the Medal of Honor for “patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded.”

Throughout her life, Dr. Walker proudly presented herself as a feminist who did not conform to gender norms. She refused to agree to “obey” her husband in her wedding vows and kept her last name, according to the National Park Service. She wore men’s clothing during the war, arguing that doing so made her job easier. After the war, she posed for photographs in suits and a signature top hat, often with her Medal of Honor pinned to her lapel.

Fort Barfoot (Fort Pickett, Va.)Col. Van Barfoot

On May 23, 1944, in the foothills of the Italian Alps, Sgt. Van Barfoot single-handedly silenced three machine-gun nests, disabled a German tank with a bazooka, blew up an artillery cannon with a demolition charge and took 17 enemy soldiers prisoner.

In addition to everything else that day, he rescued two grievously wounded American soldiers, leading them about a mile to safety.

“Any single one of these actions could merit a high award for valor,” the naming commission wrote of Colonel Barfoot, a Choctaw soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor and extolled in the news media as a “one-man army” for his actions that day.

Back home in Mississippi after the war, he publicly embarrassed the U.S. senators from his state by rejecting their racist remarks about Black soldiers, according to a biography of James Eastland, one of the two Mississippi senators.

He served 34 years in the Army, including tours in Korea and Vietnam. Later in life he again drew national attention for successfully fighting his homeowners association to keep an American flag flying in his front yard.

Fort Gregg-Adams (Fort Lee, Va.)Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg & Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley

Fort Gregg-Adams would honor two trailblazing African-American support officers, Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley. The naming commission noted the “too-often-unheralded excellence” of logistics and support units, many of which are to this day staffed primarily with Black troops.

Colonel Adams commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a segregated Women’s Army Corps unit responsible for delivering mail to American soldiers during World War II. In 1945, the 6888th was sent to England and then France — becoming the first large unit of Black servicewomen to be deployed overseas — where it processed nearly two million pieces of mail each month.

At the end of the war, Colonel Adams was the highest-ranking Black woman in the Army, according to a National Park Service biography.

At the height of his career, an article in The Washington Post said, General Gregg was the highest-ranking Black officer in the military, serving as logistics director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as deputy chief of staff for logistics for the Army in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He also participated in the desegregation of the military installation that would partially bear his name and was one of the first Black officers to join its officers’ club.

Fort Cavazos (Fort Hood, Texas)Gen. Richard E. Cavazos

Richard E. Cavazos was the first Hispanic American to become a brigadier general and the first Hispanic American to become a four-star general. He received three major military decorations for valor in combat: a Silver Star and a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in Korea, and a second Distinguished Service Cross for an episode in Vietnam.

In February 1953 during the Korean War, Lieutenant Cavazos charged through enemy mortar and gunfire, with “complete disregard for his personal safety,” to retrieve a wounded enemy soldier, earning the young officer a Silver Star. Three months later, Lieutenant Cavazos led three separate charges on enemy positions and returned to the field five times to rescue his wounded men — earning him his first Distinguished Service Cross.

In Vietnam in 1967, Colonel Cavazos again “completely disregarded his own safety” and led a charge “with such force and aggressiveness” that the enemy fighters fled their positions, earning his second Distinguished Service Cross. Throughout his career, General Cavazos also earned other awards and citations, including two Legions of Merit, five Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

Fort Eisenhower (Fort Gordon, Ga.)Dwight D. Eisenhower, general of the Army

Dwight D. Eisenhower served as the supreme commander of allied forces in Africa and Europe during World War II — leading the liberation of North Africa, the invasion of Italy and the D-Day landings. After the war, he was elected the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961.

Eisenhower soared through the Army ranks during the war, going from lieutenant colonel at the beginning of 1941 to a four-star general by February 1943. A year later, he became one of only five officers ever appointed as a five-star “general of the Army.”

As president, Eisenhower oversaw the end of the Korean War, created the interstate highway system, led efforts to form the International Atomic Energy Agency and enforced school desegregation with the deployment of federal troops.

Fort Novosel (Fort Rucker, Ala.)Chief Warrant Officer Michael Novosel Sr.

In two tours of duty in Vietnam, Michael Novosel Sr. rescued more than 5,500 wounded soldiers as a medevac pilot, earning the Medal of Honor for one particularly heroic episode. One of those rescued soldiers was his own son, Michael Novosel Jr., an Army aviator whose helicopter was shot down in 1970. (A week later, Michael Jr. returned the favor, rescuing his father from a disabled helicopter.)

Mr. Novosel, the son of Croatian immigrants, joined the Army Air Corps in 1941 and rose to the rank of captain by 1945, flying B-29 strategic bombers. He then transferred to the newly created Air Force and remained in the reserves until the 1960s. When Mr. Novosel was denied an active-duty assignment to serve in Vietnam, he gave up his rank as a lieutenant colonel and joined the Army as a warrant officer and helicopter pilot.

In one rescue mission in 1969, Mr. Novosel rescued 29 South Vietnamese soldiers under heavy enemy fire. He and his crew were forced out of the landing zone six times and had to “circle and return from another direction to land and extract additional troops,” according to his Medal of Honor citation.

By the end of the day, his helicopter had been riddled with bullets. In his own retelling of the episode during an interview with the Library of Congress, Mr. Novosel said he was shot in his right hand and leg during his last rescue of the day — momentarily causing him to lose control of the helicopter — but escaped along with his crew and the last of his evacuees.

Fort Moore (Fort Benning, Ga.)Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Julia Moore

Many Americans know Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore as the stern and resolute Colonel Moore played by Mel Gibson in “We Were Soldiers,” the gritty and somber war film that dramatized the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam. The general’s wife, Julia, played by Madeleine Stowe in the movie, had a significant role on the home front during that battle.

On Nov. 14, 1965, Colonel Moore led his 450 troops to the infamous Landing Zone X-Ray, where they were ambushed by North Vietnamese soldiers who outnumbered the Americans 12 to 1. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, but Colonel Moore and his men held their positions for three days. Colonel Moore had vowed that he would leave no one behind. He kept his promise, and his actions earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.

At the same time, Ms. Moore offered emotional support to the families of the dead and wounded at Fort Benning. Death and injury notices were sent by telegram at the time, delivered by taxi drivers. Ms. Moore began accompanying the drivers and offering her condolences to the families. Her complaints and concerns led to the creation of the Army’s casualty notification teams, and uniformed soldiers now deliver the news of death or injury to families.

A democracy came under attack. The United States saw a threat to an ally and also to the entire world order, but it feared that sending troops could spark a nuclear war. So, instead, it supplied weapons. And a small number of American Special Operations trainers started quietly working with the local military.

That was the situation in South Vietnam in 1961, a few years before full-blown U.S. military involvement, when the American presence was limited to a military “advisory group.”

It is also the situation in Ukraine today. As a bloody conflict churns on, small teams of American Special Operations veterans are training Ukrainian soldiers near the front lines and, in some cases, helping to plan combat missions.

There is a notable difference, though. In Vietnam, the trainers were active-duty troops under the control of the Pentagon. In Ukraine, where the United States has avoided sending any troops, the trainers are civilian volunteers, supported by online donations and operating entirely on their own.

“This is why I became a Green Beret,” said Perry Blackburn Jr., a retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel who spent 34 years in uniform in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Somalia and Jordan. He is now in Ukraine as a civilian doing what he once did in the military: training local forces to fight a common enemy.

“To not use my talents in a real time of need would be a waste,” said Mr. Blackburn, 60, who was one of a handful of Special Forces soldiers who rode into Afghanistan on horseback at the start of the U.S. invasion in 2001 and is funding similar efforts now through thousands of small online donations from the public.

“At my age, I’ve seen enough death and I want to try to stop the bloodshed,” he said. “We need to give people the means to defend themselves.”

Whether this new type of crowdfunded military support is wise is up for debate. Some experts caution that the presence of American volunteers could lead to some kind of tragic mishap that entangles the United States in a Vietnam-style escalation. Russia says that it would treat volunteer fighters as mercenaries and that they could be executed if captured. The United States discourages Americans from participating in the conflict. It pulled out its 150 military trainers before the war began and now relies on a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries to coordinate the flow of weapons inside Ukraine.

But the volunteers dismiss the idea that they might be stoking a larger war. Instead, they say, they are working to prevent one, by training Ukrainian fighters to put up better resistance against the Russians and deter further aggression.

Either way, Americans are in Ukraine. An unknown number are fighting on the front lines. Others volunteer to be members of casualty evacuation teams, bomb disposal specialists, logistics experts and trainers. At least 21 Americans have been wounded in combat since the war started, according to a nonprofit organization that evacuates them. Two have been killed, two have been captured and one is missing in action.

Mr. Blackburn and a small group of volunteers work directly with the Ukrainian military, teaching marksmanship, maneuvering, combat first aid and other basic skills while constantly shifting locations of training camps to avoid Russian rocket attacks.

They say they do all of it without any input from the Pentagon.

“We have no communication with the U.S. military, period,” he said in an interview from his home in Tampa, Fla., where he recently returned to resupply before returning to the war zone. “That’s a line they don’t want to cross. They are not going to take any responsibility for our well-being or our actions.”

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Then he laughed and added, “In fact, they’d probably do just the opposite.”

Not all volunteers looking to work with the Ukrainian military come with decades of experience. Mr. Blackburn and several other veterans in Ukraine said they had encountered would-be trainers with overinflated résumés and, in some cases, no military experience at all.

In a statement, the Defense Department said it “is not affiliated with any of these groups” and recommends “that U.S. citizens not travel to Ukraine or depart immediately if it is safe to do so.”

Before the war, the U.S. military regularly deployed uniformed trainers to Ukraine. As soon as Russia invaded, the Biden administration pulled out all troops. “We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine,” President Biden said.

The president vowed that the United States would continue to support Ukraine with weapons and has committed $6.8 billion in security aid. American troops are training Ukrainian forces in Poland and Germany. But Mr. Biden drew a clear line in May, saying the U.S. military would not directly fight the Russians.

The attempt to avert direct conflict, though, left a void just as the Ukrainian military’s demand for training skyrocketed. And freelance volunteers are filling it.

“We are executing U.S. foreign policy in a way the military can’t,” said Andrew Milburn, a retired Marine Corps Special Operations colonel who leads a group of volunteer veterans who provide training and advice.

Speaking by phone from a village about 15 miles from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Milburn said his efforts supported U.S. goals while insulating the United States from involvement. “I’m plausible deniability,” he said. “We can do the work, and the U.S. can say they have nothing to do with us, and that is absolutely true.”

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Soon after the war started, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appealed for international volunteers to join the fight against Russia. The first Americans to answer his call often were amateur adventurers and military misfits looking for action, several volunteers said in interviews.

The group focused on training tends to be older and more experienced. Many climbed the ranks of elite Special Operations units and have done similar work all over the globe.

During 31 years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Milburn held leadership positions in the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations command, including as the commander of the Marine Raider Regiment. He initially went to Ukraine as a freelance journalist but said he changed course after seeing the Ukrainian military hand assault rifles to inexperienced students, shopkeepers and other citizens before sending them to fight.

“This country has no shortage of trigger pullers. They didn’t need one more,” he said, explaining why he chose not to fight. “But I knew if I could train the trigger pullers, I could have an exponential effect.”

Mr. Milburn connected with about two dozen other Special Operations veterans in Ukraine, and soon they were calling themselves the Mozart Group — a name chosen as a retort to a private Russian military company, the Wagner Group. Through contacts Mr. Milburn and others had built years before with Ukrainian Special Operations troops, the Mozart Group soon set up training camps close to the fighting. Mr. Milburn said it had trained about 2,500 Ukrainian troops.

The group offers basic military instruction for soldiers headed to the front and occasional classes on how to use American weapons, like the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile.

It also provides some specialized instruction and advice for Ukrainian commandos.

Mozart would be a natural conduit for U.S. military support, he said, but when he tries to contact American military officials in Western Europe, through both official communication and back channels, he receives no response.

“Every time we reach out, we get rebuffed,” he said. “They are so afraid that something bad is going to happen and it will look like it was the purview of the government. We are persona non grata.”

But the United States is wise to be cautious, said George Beebe, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Russia analysis and the director of the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan foreign policy research institution.

“Just as in Vietnam, the risk is that we get inadvertently drawn deeper and deeper in, one small step at a time,” he said. “The difference is the stakes are higher in Ukraine. It would be much easier for the United States and Russia to get into a direct conflict that could quickly turn very serious.”

Few ever contemplated that Vietnam could grow into an enormous war, he noted. U.S. involvement started with a group of 300 soldiers in 1955 who trained South Vietnamese soldiers to respond to what some U.S. officials at the time called “a minor civil war.” Slowly, the United States committed more men and more fire power — decisions that, at the time, seemed not just reasonable but necessary, Mr. Beebe said.

Americans began accompanying South Vietnamese platoons on missions, then supporting them with aircraft. As the effort grew, so did the American troop presence. Finally, a 1964 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin drew the United States directly into the war, eventually leaving 58,000 Americans dead without achieving any strategic goals.

“I’m not saying escalation in Ukraine is automatic,” Mr. Beebe said. “But the danger is that we start crossing over red lines before we even know where they are.”

There are, of course, clear differences between Southeast Asia in 1961 and Eastern Europe today.

The government in South Vietnam at the time was unpopular, wracked by corruption and facing a communist uprising in the countryside. Ukraine’s president enjoys high approval ratings in a country united against the Russian invaders.

But just as in Vietnam, Mr. Beebe said, the United States is now forced to choose between only bad options, trying to support an ally without antagonizing a powerful foe.

Americans on the front lines say that Russia is stoking a broader conflict and that the United States has little choice but to respond.

Both Mr. Milburn and Mr. Blackburn said the United States should respond more aggressively and needed to send more sophisticated, medium-range weapons.

Mr. Blackburn said he understood the caution of the United States but felt it was misplaced because caution would only encourage Russian aggression.

“They are destroying whole cities, killing civilians indiscriminately. If that’s not escalation, what is?” he said. “I don’t see this so much as being like the years before Vietnam. To me, it’s more like the years before World War II. People are going to wonder, looking back, why we didn’t do more sooner.”

DEVENS, Mass. — The machines stand 20 feet high, weigh 60,000 pounds and represent the technological frontier of 3-D printing.

Each machine deploys 150 laser beams, projected from a gantry and moving quickly back and forth, making high-tech parts for corporate customers in fields including aerospace, semiconductors, defense and medical implants.

The parts of titanium and other materials are created layer by layer, each about as thin as a human hair, up to 20,000 layers, depending on a part’s design. The machines are hermetically sealed. Inside, the atmosphere is mainly argon, the least reactive of gases, reducing the chance of impurities that cause defects in a part.

The 3-D-printing foundry in Devens, Mass., about 40 miles northwest of Boston, is owned by VulcanForms, a start-up that came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has raised $355 million in venture funding. And its work force has jumped sixfold in the past year to 360, with recruits from major manufacturers like General Electric and Pratt & Whitney and tech companies including Google and Autodesk.

“We have proven the technology works,” said John Hart, a co-founder of VulcanForms and a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T. “What we have to show now is strong financials as a company and that we can manage growth.”

For 3-D printing, whose origins stretch back to the 1980s, the technology, economic and investment trends may finally be falling into place for the industry’s commercial breakout, according to manufacturing experts, business executives and investors.

They say 3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, is no longer a novelty technology for a few consumer and industrial products, or for making prototype design concepts.

“It is now a technology that is beginning to deliver industrial-grade product quality and printing in volume,” said Jörg Bromberger, a manufacturing expert at McKinsey & Company. He is the lead author of a recent report by the consulting firm titled, “The Mainstreaming of Additive Manufacturing.”

3-D printing refers to making something from the ground up, one layer at a time. Computer-guided laser beams melt powders of metal, plastic or composite material to create the layers. In traditional “subtractive” manufacturing, a block of metal, for example, is cast and then a part is carved down into shape with machine tools.

In recent years, some companies have used additive technology to make specialized parts. General Electric relies on 3-D printing to make fuel nozzles for jet engines, Stryker makes spinal implants and Adidas prints latticed soles for high-end running shoes. Dental implants and teeth-straightening devices are 3-D printed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 3-D printers produced emergency supplies of face shields and ventilator parts.

Today, experts say, the potential is far broader than a relative handful of niche products. The 3-D printing market is expected to triple to nearly $45 billion worldwide by 2026, according to a report by Hubs, a marketplace for manufacturing services.

The Biden administration is looking to 3-D printing to help lead a resurgence of American manufacturing. Additive technology will be one of “the foundations of modern manufacturing in the 21st century,” along with robotics and artificial intelligence, said Elisabeth Reynolds, special assistant to the president for manufacturing and economic development.

In May, President Biden traveled to Cincinnati to announce Additive Manufacturing Forward, an initiative coordinated by the White House in collaboration with major manufacturers. The five initial corporate members — GE Aviation, Honeywell, Siemens Energy, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin — are increasing their use of additive manufacturing and pledged to help their small and medium-size American suppliers adopt the technology.

The voluntary commitments are intended to accelerate investment and build a broader domestic base of additive manufacturing skills. Because 3-D printing is a high-tech digital manufacturing process, administration officials say, it plays to America’s strength in software. Additive manufacturing, they add, will make American manufacturing less dependent on casting and metalworking done overseas, especially in China.

Additive manufacturing also promises an environmental bonus. It is far less wasteful than the casting, forging and cutting of traditional manufacturing. For some metal parts, 3-D printing can cut materials costs by 90 percent and reduce energy use by 50 percent.

Industrial 3-D printing, experts say, has the potential to substantially cut the total expense of making specialized parts, if the technology can be made fast and efficient enough for higher-volume production.

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VulcanForms was founded in 2015 by Dr. Hart and one of his graduate students, Martin Feldmann. They pursued a fresh approach for 3-D printing that uses an array of many more laser beams than existing systems. It would require innovations in laser optics, sensors and software to choreograph the intricate dance of laser beams.

By 2017, they had made enough progress to think they could build a machine, but would need money to do it. The pair, joined by Anupam Ghildyal, a serial start-up veteran who had become part of the VulcanForms team, went to Silicon Valley. They secured a seed round of $2 million from Eclipse Ventures.

The VulcanForms technology, recalled Greg Reichow, a partner at Eclipse, was trying to address the three shortcomings of 3-D printing: too slow, too expensive and too ridden with defects.

The start-up struggled to build a first machine that proved its concept workable. But it eventually succeeded. And later versions grew larger, more powerful and more precise.

Its printers, VulcanForms said, now generate 100 times the laser energy of most 3-D printers, and can produce parts many times faster. That print technology is the company’s core intellectual asset, protected by dozens of patents.

But VulcanForms has decided not to sell its machines. Its strategy is to be a supplier to customers in need of custom-made parts.

That approach allows VulcanForms to control the entire manufacturing process. But it is also a concession to the reality that the ecosystem of additive manufacturing is lacking. The company is building each stage of the manufacturing process itself, making its own printers, designing parts, doing final machining and testing.

“We absolutely have to do it ourselves — build the full stack of digital manufacturing — if we are to succeed,” said Mr. Feldmann, who is the chief executive. “The factory is the product.”

The Devens facility has six of the giant printers. By next year, there should be 20, the company said. VulcanForms has scouted four locations for a second factory. In five years, the company hopes to have several 3-D printing factories up and running.

The do-it-yourself strategy also magnifies the risk and the cost for the start-up. But the company has convinced a roster of high-profile recruits that the risk is worth it.

Brent Brunell joined VulcanForms last year from General Electric, where he was an additive manufacturing expert. The concept of using large arrays of lasers in 3-D printing is not new, Mr. Brunell said, but no one had really pulled it off before. After he joined VulcanForms and examined its technology, he said, “it was obvious these guys were onto the next architecture, and they had a process that was working.”

Beside each machine in VulcanForms’s facility, an operator monitors its performance with a stream of sensor data and a camera image of the laser beams at work, piped to a computer screen. The sound of the factory is a low, electronic hum, much like a data center.

The factory itself can be a potent recruiting tool. “I bring them here and show them the machinery,” said Kip Wyman, a former senior manufacturing manager at Pratt & Whitney, who is head of operations at VulcanForms. “The usual reaction is, ‘Heck, I want to be part of that.’”

For some industrial parts, 3-D printing alone is not enough. Final heat treatment and metal machining are needed. Recognizing that, VulcanForms acquired Arwood Machine this year.

Arwood is a modern machine shop that mostly does work for the Pentagon, making parts for fighter jets, underwater drones and missiles. Under VulcanForms, the plan over the next few years is for Arwood to triple its investment and work force, currently 90 people.

VulcanForms, a private company, does not disclose its revenue. But it said sales were climbing rapidly, while orders were rising tenfold quarter by quarter.

Sustained growth for VulcanForms is going to depend on increasing sales to customers like Cerebras, which makes specialized semiconductor systems for artificial intelligence applications. Cerebras sought out VulcanForms last year for help making a complex part for water-cooling its powerful computer processors.

The semiconductor company sent VulcanForms a computer-design drawing of the concept, an intricate web of tiny titanium tubes. Within 48 hours VulcanForms had come back with a part, recalled Andrew Feldman, chief executive of Cerebras. Engineers for both companies worked on further refinements, and the cooling system is now in use.

Accelerating the pace of experimentation and innovation is one promise of additive manufacturing. But modern 3-D printing, Mr. Feldman said, also allows engineers to make new, complex designs that improve performance. “We couldn’t have made that water-cooling part any other way,” Mr. Feldman said.

“Additive manufacturing lets us rethink how we build things,” he said. “That’s where we are now, and that’s a big change.”

BUFFALO — Buffalo was riding a decade-long economic turnaround when a racially motivated attack by a gunman killed 10 people in May, overshadowing the progress. While the city grieved, it also had to reckon with unflattering portrayals of the East Side, the impoverished neighborhood where the massacre took place.

Those harsh takes tell only part of the story, say residents, business owners and city officials. Now, they are determined to put the focus back on the recovery.

Major efforts to improve the East Side have been afoot for years, like new job-training facilities and the overhaul of a deserted train station. And citywide initiatives to pour billions into parks, public art projects and apartment complexes have made Buffalo a more desirable place to live, advocates say.

Those efforts may have even reversed a chronic population decline: The latest census figures show Buffalo’s population has increased for the first time in 70 years.

“The other story about Buffalo needs to be told, that investments are being made,” said Brandye Merriweather, the president of the Buffalo Urban Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that works to repurpose empty city-owned lots.

“I am very sensitive to the issues that the shooting has raised,” said Ms. Merriweather, who grew up across the street from where the shooting took place and still has family in the neighborhood.

The wave of progress began in 2012 when New York’s governor at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo, pledged $1 billion in grants and tax credits as part of a revitalization effort, and it has been fueled by a mix of taxpayer funds and private investments in the years since.

Perhaps the most visible sign of Buffalo’s changing fortunes are its new apartments, which turn up in empty warehouses, former municipal buildings and longtime parking lots converted into much-needed housing. In the last decade, 224 multifamily projects — encompassing 10,150 apartments, most of them rentals, the equivalent of about $3 billion in investment — have opened or are underway, according to the office of Mayor Byron W. Brown.

And the pace of new housing appears to be quickening: A third of the total, or 78 projects, were unveiled just in 2020 and 2021, the mayor’s office said.

Among them is Seneca One Tower, the city’s tallest building and one of Buffalo’s most prominent projects. Completed in 1972 as a home for a bank, it sat vacant in recent years. Now, the 40-story downtown spire features a variety of uses after a $100 million renovation.

Douglas Development, which bought the tower six years ago, added 115 apartments while also installing a food hall, a large gym and a craft brewery. It also raised walls around a plaza to curb Lake Erie winds.

Barbara Foy, 64, who began renting a two-bedroom apartment at Seneca One this spring with her husband, Jack, 65, said she enjoyed sleeping with her blinds cracked to enjoy the glitter of the skyline. For almost three decades, Ms. Foy worked around the corner as a social worker, though she never really stuck around at night, instead driving back to her home in the suburbs.

But revitalization has helped her see Buffalo in a whole new light. “There seems to be something going on every weekend,” Ms. Foy said, adding that she enjoyed the city’s Pride parade in June. “Buffalo has really come alive, and I’m so proud of it.”

Office leasing has been slow. About 70 percent of the spaces at Seneca One are rented, most of them to M&T Bank, which is based in Buffalo, as well as a dozen small tech firms. The vacancy rate for top office buildings downtown was 13 percent at the end of last year, according to the brokerage firm CBRE, down from 14 percent in 2020.

Residential leasing, on the other hand, has been robust. It took just nine months to rent all of the apartments at Seneca One after they hit the market in fall 2020 for up to $3,000 a month, said Greg Baker, a director of development at Douglas. Buffalo’s median rent is $800 a month, according to census figures.

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Since its Seneca One purchase, Douglas has acquired about 20 properties in the region, including former hotels and hospitals that will be converted to housing.

“People are selling houses in the suburbs to move back into the city, versus when I was younger, when they would live in the suburbs and commute to the city,” said Mr. Baker, a Buffalo native.

In a spread-out city that’s sliced up by highways, improving infrastructure has been a priority, too, though efforts so far have mostly come to fruition on the West Side. For instance, a stretch of Niagara Street near a bridge to Canada that was once lined with auto dealerships now gleams with new sidewalks, streetlights and a protected bike lane. Bike shops and restaurants have revived dilapidated storefronts there, too.

Nearby, workers are about to begin a $110 million overhaul of LaSalle Park, a 77-acre waterfront green space that’s hemmed in by Interstate 190. Plans call for a wide pedestrian bridge over the highway.

Softening the rough edges of Buffalo’s commercial past is also a focus downtown, at Canalside, a neighborhood-in-progress that hugs a short remnant of the original Erie Canal. On a recent afternoon, school groups milled around signs explaining how Midwest wheat and pine once flowed through Buffalo en route to Europe. Movie nights and yoga classes take place on lawns nearby.

“Buffalo may have a ways to go, but it still has come a long way,” Stephanie Surowiec, 32, said as she sat in the sun sipping a hard cider bought from a nearby stand. A nurse who grew up in Buffalo’s suburbs, Ms. Surowiec lives in the city limits today.

If there’s a model for how Buffalo can wring new uses from its industrial hulks, it might be Larkinville, a former soap- and box-making enclave in the city that developers reinvented as a business district about a decade ago. Blocklong factories that now hold offices huddle around a plaza dotted with colorful Adirondack chairs. Wednesday night concerts are a summer staple.

Makeovers of a similar scale are fewer on the East Side, but that could soon change.

This spring, officials announced an infusion of $225 million for the neighborhood, including $185 million from the state. Among the funding is $30 million for an African American heritage corridor along Michigan Avenue and $61 million to redevelop Central Terminal, a 17-story Art Deco train station that had its last passengers in 1979.

In June, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an investment of $50 million for the East Side to help homeowners with repairs and unpaid utility bills.

Some projects have already produced tangible results, like the redevelopment of a 35-acre portion of factory-lined Northland Avenue. Though many of the neighborhood’s properties remain derelict, one, which made machines for metalworking, was reborn in 2018 as 237,000-square-foot Northland Central, an office and educational complex. It includes the Northland Workforce Training Center, which teaches job skills to area residents.

“The impact of the place has been phenomenal,” said Derek Frank, 41, who enrolled in classes after serving an eight-year prison sentence for dealing drugs. Today, Mr. Frank is employed as an electrician, as is his son, Derek Jr., 21, who attended classes alongside his father.

“Them putting that building right here in the heart of the city makes it accessible and convenient,” he added.

But East Side redevelopment plans have sometimes hit bumps. An effort to create a cluster of hospitals called the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has caused gentrification. But advocates point out that the hospitals, which employ 15,000, have picked up some of the economic slack after factories shut down.

Whether spurred on by public investment or other reasons, Buffalo has seen notable growth. Its population of 278,000 in the 2020 census was up 7 percent from 261,000 in 2010.

Buffalo enjoys a steady stream of immigrants, like the family of Muhammad Z. Zaman, which immigrated from Bangladesh in 2004 in part because Buffalo was one of the few places in the United States with an Islamic grade school, Mr. Zaman said.

Today, Mr. Zaman, 31, a working artist, is one of several muralists hired to add bright designs to walls of buildings left exposed by demolitions. One of his creations, which incorporates Arabic calligraphy that translates to “our colors make us beautiful,” jazzes up the side of a structure on Broadway.

“When we first moved here, I felt like we were the only Bangladeshi family,” said Mr. Zaman, who noted that there wasn’t a single halal-style restaurant in Buffalo in the mid-2000s, versus about 20 today. “Now, people are coming here from all over the place.”