Bummertown. That's what they called it, back in the '90s. As the rest of Puget Sound - heck, the whole nation - enjoyed explosive prosperity, Bremerton fell deep into urban decay. Its downtown was a boarded-up shell, its empty stores valued only for their parking. Its neighborhoods were crumbling, landlords no longer willing to maintain World War II emergency housing that wasn't supposed to last that long anyway.

Bummertown. For a generation, it's been the forgotten stepchild of Puget Sound, the grimy black hole across from the gleaming Emerald City, a destination on a ferry that nobody takes. It's the Oakland of the Northwest, a Harlem to Belltown's SoHo, a Compton with rain.

Poor. Old. Bummertown.

But today something's happening in the town we all forgot. New condos line the city's waterfront. New partnerships have brought a gleaming government building and downtown marina, turned scrap heaps into parks and parking lots into a convention center. A handful of businesses have moved across the Sound. National magazines are putting Bremerton high on their lists of up-and-coming cities.

Is Bummertown now Boomerton? The signs are all there, says Bellevue developer Ron Sher, who owns two pieces of downtown real estate. "I have a lot of confidence in the future of Bremerton," he says. "What they've done is remarkable."

Mayor Cary Bozeman's office is on the top floor of the new Norm Dicks Government Building, a three-year-old structure on high ground overlooking Bremerton's downtown and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

The building's an example of what Bozeman's trying to do in his adopted city: Bremerton couldn't afford a new city hall, so Bozeman convinced six other government agencies to pool their money with him to build the building - Bremerton's first Class A office structure.

Bozeman gets a lot of the credit for Bremerton's resurgence.

"There were a lot of ideas in place before Cary got here, but he's just a doer," says Jerry Reid, a real estate broker and civic leader in Bremerton since the 1960s.

Bozeman's friendly and high-energy. He says he hires smart people to run his city for him, so he can spend 80 percent of his time promoting it. He keeps a personal mailing list and sends those people envelopes stuffed with photocopies of upbeat stories about his city. Those stories beget other stories.

"It goes to show you don't need a Ph.D. in marketing to get the buzz out," says Andrea Spencer, the city's community development director.

Bozeman's selling a vision: downtown Bremerton reborn as the "Harborside District" - an urban village on the shores of Puget Sound, with high-rise condos and apartments, street-level retail and pedestrianfriendly parks, all tied closely to the ferry terminal, a marina and a boardwalk.

"If we're smart, and we are now," he says, "there's no reason we can't be a vibrant city."

To get there, Bozeman and the city council have done a lot: Working together with other agencies to do projects none could manage on their own; approving tax breaks for developers of multifamily housing; and lifting height limits on buildings. The city's planning staff has preapproved development plans for more than 2,000 houses, apartments and condo units, and pledges 20-day turnarounds on building permits.

"We're teed up in all areas," Spencer says.

Bozeman's got experience with this whole boomtown thing. He spent 16 years, from 1977-1993, on the Bellevue City Council, a key time in Bellevue's transition from bedroom suburb to bustling edge city. He served three stints as Bellevue's mayor but was out of politics by 1995, when he got a consulting job with the Olympic College Foundation in Bremerton. He was charmed by the old Navy city. "I really liked it," he says. "I sold my house and moved."