After I failed to find easy parking in Old Oakland for the second weekend in a row, the unfamiliar thought flashed through my mind: “All these damn bridge-and-tunnel types are starting to ruin this town.” I was only half joking. It was a Saturday evening, and B Restaurant was already rocking. No spaces on Washington Street. A new design gallery, Fiveten Studio, brainchild of the prolific Alfonso Dominguez (he co-owns the intimate Old Oakland restaurant Tamarindo), was having an opening around the corner. Some of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen in my adopted hometown were smiling brightly and sipping champagne outside the well-lit space. The entire block was closed off, anyway, so the city could show a free movie after sunset. No parking on Ninth, either.

At one point, I found myself cruising all the way down near Jack London Square. On Second Street, a dark-clad crowd of impossibly thin kids in their late teens and early 20s waited, like roosting crows with a bad tobacco habit, to get into the Oakland Metro Operahouse. I could hear the throbbing bass of a punk band checking its sound. I circled back, parked five blocks from my destination, and made my way to plush Levende East (sister of Levende Lounge in San Francisco), where the dinner crowd was an unself-conscious mixture of old and young, black and white, Asian and Latino—that’s Oakland—but the air had an intriguing snootiness, or a whiff of it, that I hadn’t encountered anywhere this far outside Rockridge. I love this city of 400,000 people, its very American history, its polyglot populace, its industrial blocks and beautiful buildings and wild spaces, its aura of countercultural romance. But I’ve often felt it lacked any real urban buzz and a certain cosmopolitan instinct for self-promotion. So I took all this as a good sign.

These days, even important streets can still seem deserted when they ought to be humming—the lights go out early in semiurban Oakland—but more and more, the necessary elements of a metropolis are finding their way east. Street by street, the city is coming into its urban own—one nightclub, art gallery, renovated building, shop, restaurant, and condo at a time. As would-be San Francisco homeowners and businesses chafe at the cost of living and operating there, Oakland finds itself on a relentless drive toward a modern-day revitalization akin to what happened south of Market in the ’90s, or the incursion of youthful hipness Brooklyn has seen in the past decade.

Signs of new energy are everywhere. With a half-dozen enormous condo projects nearing completion, Oakland’s downtown is on the verge of hosting the kind of diverse, 24-7 life that animates every block and causes entrepreneurs to begin sniffing out opportunities. Restaurants and bars—some elegant, some noisy and rife with sexual energy, some quiet and friendly—are already sprouting, like long-dormant bulbs that have finally gotten water. Art galleries are reinvigorating neglected spaces all over the city. Whole Foods is opening its first store in Oakland (Trader Joe’s

James O’Brien is a writer living in Oakland’s Glenview district and a correspondent for GQ.