This is one in a series of weekly profiles of the communities that make Greater Cincinnati unique. Next week: Blue Ash

Just living in Westwood for a lifetime isn't enough.

You have to be second- or third-generation Westwood before you're considered a ''native,'' said Nick Vehr. He knows because he is one.

''Westwood is still a neighborhood where neighbors take care of each other, where families buy homes near each other, where being second- or third-generation is viewed as a positive thing,'' said Mr. Vehr, the former city councilman who is now trying to bring the Olympics to Cincinnati.

That Westwood heritage is not just a positive thing, it's necessary to be considered ''old Westwood.''

Even Buddy LaRosa - the pizza king who opened his first restaurant in Westwood in 1954 and has lived there 40 years - is still ''new Westwood,'' as far as second-generation Westwood residents such as Bob Sontag are concerned.

Mr. LaRosa doesn't seem to mind.

''Westwood is, to me, the grass roots of Cincinnati,'' he said.

Mr. LaRosa won't leave Westwood, he said, until ''the good Lord calls me.''

The heart of the community is Westwood Town Hall, at the corner of Harrison and Montana avenues. The huge, brick Romanesque Revival-style building, completed in 1889, features preschool classes and plays instead of the jail and fire department it once housed.

Churches and tree-lined residential streets grow out from the corner. Some houses are brick, some are frame. They're generally well-kept, and many are home to statues of the Virgin Mary, testament to the strong Roman Catholic community that still thrives here.

Mr. Sontag, whose father started his business in Westwood in 1941, still works out of the Harrison Avenue building where Sontag Cleaners has been for nearly 50 years.

''I just got acclimated to the Westwood life, and I've stayed,'' he said.

The birth of roots

Westwood life started as a refuge from the busy city. The neighborhood incorporated as a village in the 1860s and grew considerably through the 1880s thanks to the Cincinnati & Westwood railway commuter line.

Residential development grew even faster starting in the mid-1890s, when the Cincinnati Street Railways Co. started streetcar service to the western suburbs.

That's when Carl Guckenberger's parents moved to Westwood, and he's lived there for almost 82 years.

Mr. Guckenberger remembers seeing James N. Gamble - son of the soap maker who went into business with Mr. Procter in 1837 - drive an electric motor car to and from the Gamble House on Westwood's Werk Road.

''It's just like a pair of old shoes,'' Mr. Guckenberger said of Westwood. ''You get used to them.''

The village of Westwood was annexed BY Cincinnati in 1896, and its citizens organized the Westwood Improvement Association to push city government for better roads, sewers and public transportation.

The Westwood tradition of organized lobbying has continued. As Cincinnati's biggest city neighborhood - with about 10 percent of the city's population - Westwood must stay organized to get its due from the city, said Mike Schmidt, immediate past president of the Westwood Civic Association.

Mr. Schmidt describes the association as ''highly visible, highly organized and highly active.''

''We get heard BY the city,'' he said.

A homey place

Westwood residents are, for the most part, a proud bunch. An unraked yard is the exception among the neighborhood's tidy lawns. The civic association encourages attention to appearances with a yard-of-the-month contest, which Mr. Sontag has won more than once.

The neighborhood is less than 10 miles from downtown. And home prices are much more affordable than those in Hyde Park, Mount Lookout or the Kentucky communities of Fort Mitchell or Fort Thomas, said Mr. Schmidt, a lawyer.

Local Realtor and third-generation Westwood resident Vera Jean Hinkle - known in the business as ''Miss Westwood'' - said some of her listings could easily fetch 50 percent more if they were on the other side of town.

Cherreese Parker likes Westwood because there's a nice mix of different races, she said, and she doesn't sense the kind of racial tension that exists elsewhere.

''Everybody just gets along out here in Westwood,'' said Ms. Parker, who has lived there for more than a decade.

Candice Skeen has lived in Westwood only a few years, but she's already decided it's where she wants to stay. Candice, 15, met her true love at St. Catharine of Siena Church, the neighborhood institution where she plans to get married.

''I wouldn't change it for the world,'' she said of the community. ''It's a homey kind of place.''

But Westwood has changed, and it seems to keep changing no matter how some longtime residents wish it wouldn't.

Its convenience to downtown has attracted problems along with growth.

It used to be that just about all Westwood residents lived in the houses they owned and took great pride in their homes, yards and community, Mr. Sontag said.

These days, there are growing numbers of apartment buildings, and some are filled with families that don't stay put for very long, he said.

Though Westwood still has its share of homes like the stately, Queen Anne-style Gamble House, it's also home to some federally subsidized Section 8 housing.

A lot of the old-timers have passed on or moved on to neighborhoods farther from the city, Mr. Sontag said. And roads that used to be home to doctors now are home to less affluent professionals, he said.

The new, old Westwood

Mr. Sontag worries that the new people and many of the old-timers' children don't seem to care like the old-timers did.

He remembers the old old-timers telling him which groups needed him whether he had the time to give or not. Mr. Sontag made the time. The 24 years he coached football for St. Catharine School were some of the only times he saw his kids during those years because of the demands of his business.

But finally Mr. Sontag got ''meetinged out,'' as he puts it. And he had to give up coaching.

''If I'd kept coaching, I'd have been coaching against a couple of grandsons (who play for other parishes), and I couldn't do that,'' he said.

Ruth Mullins, who has owned Colonial Beauty Shoppe since 1951 and has worked there even longer, said her longtime clients complain most about the changes around Westwood.

The constants - like the $11 shampoo and set at her shop - are fewer and fewer.

The old movie theater down the block closed some years ago. More and more, the younger women are moving with their families farther out.

But when Colonial clients gripe about the changes, their longtime beautician simply tells them, ''Life does change.''

For Westwood, though, maybe the changes that time brings will eventually make it more like the community it used to be.

The community is getting younger again, with more and more families with young children moving to Westwood, said the Rev. Robert Schmitz, pastor of St. Catharine church.

And some of those young families are led BY people who grew up in the community, left and then came back, bringing with them an appreciation for old Westwood.

Mr. Vehr is one of those people. After college, he lived in Washington, D.C., and on the East Side of Cincinnati for a bit. But when it came time to buy a house, Mr. Vehr and his family bought in Westwood. Their second house is just three blocks from where Mr. Vehr's mother lived.

''There is something very comfortable,'' Mr. Vehr said, ''about driving with your children sitting next to you down the same streets your father drove with you sitting next to him.''