The talk among the two couples at the bar at Empire Little Bar Bistro on Granby Street, the Broadway of Norfolk's downtown, is about digital photo enhancements. How to manipulate this or that in Photoshop. It's urbane, like the setting. Martinis, dark beer and red wine dominate the drink orders. The menu of tapas is eclectic, ranging from the coriander shrimp scampi with roasted pine nuts to the beef filet with boursin potato mousse and red wine reduction, which is my choice. Distinctive propeller fans twirl lazily overhead giving the small space the feel of an updated southern speakeasy.

            The cool sophistication belies the building's recent history: before the restaurant and hotel above it opened in 2000, this was a flophouse, literally renting rooms by the hour.

            As 8 p.m. approaches on a Friday, every bar seat and every table is filled. But then getting a parking place in a restaurant -- or on the street -- isn't easy in downtown Norfolk these days. Across the street, The 219, a casual eatery with creative dishes, is packed. A few blocks up at Time, a pulsing club, the twentysomethings are already lined up to get in, cell phones toggled to their ears. A block away on Monticello, a heavy metal band is scheduled at The Norva, a cavernous 1,500-person capacity music hotspot that offers everything from emo bands to longtime rockers like The Pretenders and country crooners like Mary Chapin Carpenter. The Virginia Stage Company is dark this night, having recently completed a run of "Rounding Third," a comedy about Little League. In MacArthur Center, a sprawling 140-store upscale urban mall, the aisles are humming with shoppers and moviegoers headed to the third floor cineplex.

            In the last six years, the city's downtown, long ignored after dark, has blossomed. Karl Dorneman remembers people suggesting he consider downtown for a restaurant shortly after moving to Norfolk in 1995. No way.  "Downtown was a place where people would say, 'I'm going to get bread, cover me,' " he cracks. “People didn't walk around downtown in daylight, let alone when the sun went down."

            By the time he and his partners opened Empire in 2000, downtown remained very much a work in progress, but the hotel above offered terms they couldn't refuse.

            Tonight, the crowd inside Empire is symbolic of how thoroughly Norfolk, a city with a decades-long reputation as a decaying World War II Navy town, has transformed itself into the vibrant, cosmopolitan heart of a metropolitan area of 1.7 million people. There are an estimated 3,000 people living downtown with hundreds more residences in the works. There are more than 70 new restaurants and clubs and new ones opening daily, it seems. There is a community college campus, filling what once was a department store. More than one million people annually visit Town Point Park on the Elizabeth River, the site of festivals during the warm months. The battleship Wisconsin, moored at a downtown pier next to Nauticus, the national maritime museum, attracted 380,000 visitors last year. An adjacent pier expansion, built only four years ago, is scheduled to be expanded into a state of the art cruise terminal in 2006.

            A recent Brookings Institution report about downtown renaissances nationwide labeled Norfolk as one of 13 "emerging downtowns," only the fully-developed downtowns of Boston, Chicago, Manhattan and Philadelphia. USA Today declared it "one of America's Top 10 booming downtowns." Forbes called it one of the top 10 locations for businesses.

            Christopher Hanna, now the artistic director of the Virginia Stage Company, which produces plays in the historic Wells Theater just off Granby Street,  said attracting people downtown during his first stint with the company in the 1980s was a struggle. Now, Hanna, who has worked in numerous cities including New York, says Norfolk's downtown offers just the right scale. It's walkable -- "there's not that large town anonymity," he says --  yet there's enough happening daily to keep downtown interesting.

            Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the city patiently put small pieces in place downtown, including transforming the stage company's home, the historic Wells Theater, from an X-rated movie venue into a playhouse. Office towers, the Sheraton Waterside Hotel and Harbor Park, a minor league baseball stadium overlooking the river, helped bring more people downtown and began to dispel the notion of it as an evening wasteland.

            Then the city made two unconventional moves. It enticed Tidewater Community College to open a branch campus in an old department store on Granby Street, several blocks from the water. More than 2,400 students enrolled the first year, bringing new life to the street.

            About the same time, city officials convinced Nordstrom's, the upscale department store, to become the anchor tenant  in a $300 million upscale urban mall developed by Taubman Centers. Called MacArthur Center, after the general who is buried nearby, the mall features 141 shops, restaurants and movie theaters and sits on 17 acres of land the city had let sit fallow for years as parking lots. The then cash-strapped city gambled its urban mall could succeed when others had failed, investing $100 million in the venture, including a $32.8 million loan to help Nordstrom's construct an anchor store for the mall, which opened in March 1999.

            The city put up valuable properties, including its main library building, convention center, Scope arena and Town Point Park as collateral. It was a big gamble, a gamble that paid big dividends.

            In its first full year, the mall's tax revenue to the city was $6.53 million, nearly $1 million more than the city needed to meet its debt payment. For 2002, the last year figures are available because of staff cutbacks in the revenue office, city officials said they did even better, turning a $3 million profit on the deal after paying the debt.

            Just as important to city officials, it helped create a feeding frenzy of development downtown, especially the building of residential units. Since the mall opened, $1.5 billion has been invested in the downtown by commercial and residential developers and businesses. More than 460 units have been built and another 832 are either in development or under construction. The average household income downtown has risen to $84,634 from $46,007 in 1990. Sales on Granby Street, outside the mall, increased 378 percent from about $4 million in 1999 to more than $20 million in 2004, according to the Norfolk Department of Development.

            Throughout, the city has pushed developers to fit into its plan, weighing in unapologetically on everything from big picture uses to the types of lighting on the street and in parking garages. Paul Fraim, who has been on city council for 18 years, including the last 12 as mayor, says:  "We have our own vision of what the city should be like. We're not willing to let someone set the city's agenda."

            That vision reveals a bustling Granby Street on this Friday night as midnight approaches. Premiere, a state of the art dance club in the historic, renovated Granby Theater, throbs with lights, beats and bodies. Time still has a line of twentysomethings. Relative Theory Records, a music store and performance space on a second floor above the street, has half a dozen browsers. Empire is packed again, this time with a younger crowd sipping midnight martinis. Nearby, at Station 2, a restaurant and music venue, The Persuasions, an acapella group, nears the end of its second set. Two nights later, jazz legend Stanley Jordan will play a dinner show.

            Ned Rabinowitz, one of the owners, is typical of the natives who moved away, came back for what they thought was a brief stay and found themselves enticed by the developing downtown scene.

            "If I was in a yearbook I would probably be in the category of least likely to return. All my friends were shocked I came back here," he says. Not only has he returned after spending time in Berkeley and San Francisco, he plans to stay. "I could see that I wasn't alone. The people I grew up with that had been here are moving back, these kids of families who had success in other areas are coming back and seeing this place as a place to live. This actually could be a real city."

            Dorneman has sold his interest in Empire and has opened other restaurants. Even he concedes he didn't foresee the downtown's swift renaissance. "I think one of the things that makes Norfolk cool is that it actually had a downtown. Everybody else (other cites) is trying to create areas of synergy," he says. "We had the place. We just had to encourage people to come back to it."

Writer Jim Morrison left Norfolk to live in New York and other cities before returning just as the downtown started to rise.