By Adam Martin

AT ONE END of the counter in a small downtown Oakland coffeehouse called Mama Buzz Café, there's a green table that's likely to draw a visitor's attention. The café, located on a busy stretch of Telegraph Avenue, is cozy, inviting, and fairly neat, except for the table, where a Scotchgard container jockeys for position with cans of beer, BART tickets, a package of Christmas garland, 3-D glasses, tacks, stamps, art supplies, some poems, a calculator, and an empty bottle sporting a pair of clay breasts. An installation by a former neighbor named Mark Horowitz, the table is known as the Trading Post, and in its daily life it serves as a place where, if you have a guitar pick and no newspaper, you can put your pick down on the table, grab a quarter, and buy yourself a paper. Later, rest assured, someone else will stop in for coffee on the way to band practice, lay down a stamp, and take the pick you just left. It's a functional art piece, much like Mama Buzz itself.

With seating limited to a row of stools along the front counter and one small table against the opposite wall, the café is decidedly cramped, but a back patio provides cruising room, as does the adjacent Buzz Gallery, a huge, airy, couch-filled space where art receptions, performances, and other events take place. Artwork, predominantly local, hangs all over the café and gallery, and even the café's crowded bulletin board is a contender, as evidenced by a mailing list for the West Oakland Surf Club that's taken on the identity of a permanent exhibit. "Yeah," co-owner Jen Loy says, "they never went surfing, but we've left it up just for kicks. Is it art or is it trash?"

Mama Buzz opened in January 2003, a miraculous few months after Loy, editor in chief of Oakland-based arts and culture magazine Kitchen Sink, learned the space was available. Previous tenant Papa Buzz Café had closed up shop, and Loy saw proprietor Ivan Blackshear's For Sale sign as she was checking out the block in anticipation of a K.S. show at nearby Ego Park Gallery. She quickly got a fellow staffer, Web designer Nicole Neditch, involved.

"I said, 'Hey, how'd you like to buy a café and gallery?' " Loy recounts. "I'm kind of joking, and she goes, 'Actually, I've always wanted to do that.' " Soon they were in negotiations to lease the space and buy equipment from Blackshear. Kevin Slagle, who runs Ego Park and is a professional contractor, offered to help with interior work. "If he hadn't been so supportive," Loy says, "we never would have been able to move in." Having cleared that hurdle, Loy and Neditch have worked hard to turn Mama Buzz into a local cultural hub, with art exhibits, craft parties, live music, and a steady stream of miscellaneous events like last Saturday's "Downtown Oakland Record Show," an upcoming clothing swap, and Feb. 22's "Lo-Vol Holocaust" listening party.

When Papa Buzz shut down in October 2002, the space looked like a lot of other storefronts on the stretch of Telegraph between West Grand Avenue and 27th Street: barred up, empty, and very closed. Around the time Loy and Neditch went into negotiations, the main activity in the area was at the abandoned Sears building on 27th and Telegraph, then being renovated and turned into offices and condos. However, one of the latter would soon house the city's mayor. And shortly after the café opened, the manager of Mama Buzz's building, Rod Kiracofe, received a grant through the Oakland Façade Improvement Program. The bars came off the storefront, a gallery window went in, and the business took off. The café attracted a crowd of artists and other crafty types. It even caught the attention of new neighbor Jerry Brown: he attended an art event at Mama Buzz and spoke with Neditch and Loy, who say he's been something of a regular ever since.

And in the year since Mama Buzz opened, the stretch of Telegraph where it sits has seen an undeniable resurgence. Most of it's commercial – a new dance studio, a pizza joint, a frozen yogurt shop, a dollar store – but a church and women's rehab center have added some community services to the mix. And aside from the revolving exhibits at Buzz Gallery, Ego Park, and nearby 21 Grand, the area has been graced with the work of one Justin Artifice, a guerrilla art collaboration in the habit of leaving its mark on boarded-up buildings, such as the mural of a woman lining up a pool shot across the street from the café. Mayor Brown denies that a short-lived mural next door to his condo – depicting a cluster of hills and a sign that read, "Jerrywood" – ended up in his apartment.

The intersection of art, commerce, and politics on Telegraph has left a formerly decaying corner of Oakland increasingly vibrant. As Loy says, "We're not invisible anymore."