In Praise of the Local Hipster Coffee Shop

Currently sitting in my local hipster coffee shop doing local hipster things like writing on my Substack and praising antifa. Considering how much time I spend in places like this now, it’s hard to believe that American coffee shop culture is a pretty recent development. Back when I attended NYU towards the end of the previous century, coffee shops weren’t even a thing. Greenwich Village had a quartet of them on a single corner, but they had a faded bohemian vibe, relics of the dying 60’s counterculture, sort of like what Hard Rock Cafés are to the 80’s today.

Coffee shops didn’t seem to make sense outside of Paris. After all, no self-respecting American would open a business in which patrons were allowed to hang out for hours on comfy furniture while enjoying a single hot beverage. What kind of business model is that? Back then, if you wanted to hang out on comfy furniture for hours at a time, you had to go to your parents’ house. Which, I mean, no thanks.

Look at all these hipsters plotting their next insurrection.

Back then Starbucks was still a regional Seattle brand that had yet to escape the rainy Northwest. The Disney-esque word “frappuccino” had yet to burrow its ungainly way into the lexicon. Free Wifi wasn’t a thing because Wifi wasn’t a thing. People in coffee shops, such as they were, went to play chess or read Sartre or (in my case) pretend to read Sartre in the hopes of getting noticed by a pretty girl intrigued by the fact that I was pretending to read Sartre.

As a new New Yorker, I was bummed to discover that the coffee shops of my imaginings didn’t exist. Even the ones in the Village were overpriced and dark and, although they didn’t explicitly ask you to leave if they felt you overstayed your welcome, scornful glances awaited once your time within exceeded half an hour or so. Plus, the girls there didn’t seem to care how many existentialist philosophers I “read;” none of them ever expressed any interest in me beyond asking whether or not that chair was taken and, if not, if they could steal it. It was not; they could.

People hung out in bars, which wasn’t great because I didn’t drink and didn’t particularly want to spend my nights in smoky, sticky overloud rooms with bad jukeboxes and sporadically working pinball machines. I suppose I could (and did) go to the library at times, which provided a good working environment. But I didn’t want a “good working environment.” I wasn’t working. I was waiting to be discovered. Either by the aforementioned pretty girl or perhaps by a movie director seeking a fey and pimply nineteen-year-old to star in their next film. Maybe a celebrity would stroll into my coffee shop and sit beside me while we talked. That almost happened to me once at a diner when Suzanne Vega sat in the next booth and my friend and I wrote her a long mash note on the back of our paper placemat. We gave it to the waitress to give to Suzanne, who read it and then graciously took the time to write us back: “I don’t know who you think I am but I am not her.”

It was probably seven or eight years of living in New York City before a coffee shop opened in my neighborhood. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I wonder if the emergence of New York coffee shops had anything to do with the popularity of the show Friends and their hangout at “Central Perk.” At the time, I was living on East 23^rd St. This was a bit of a Manhattan No Man’s Land. Rents must have been low enough in that neighborhood to accommodate a funky, art-filled space a block up from my apartment. Within a year, a Starbucks went in right next door, which must have been infuriating to the owners. I vowed never to use that Starbucks, and I never did, at least until the original coffee shop closed down because they not compete with Starbucks, which also shut down a few years afterwards. Ironically, just up the block from where those coffee shops used to be is “The Friends Experience,” an interactive Friends (museum? fan space?) that features a working recreation of Central Perk. Maybe they should have just started with that.

Look how much fun these friends are having!

I have a lot of gratitude for the local coffee shop. The hipster coffee shop. The artsy-fartsy coffee shop. The place with overstuffed couches and stale pastries of dubious origin. Every book and screenplay I’ve ever written has been composed, at least in part, in places like that. I’ve also spent innumerable hours in coffee shops people-watching and matcha-sipping and thumb-twiddling. The local coffee shop is, in the truest sense of the word, a community center. It’s a place where people fron all walks of life (maybe most walks of life, I should say) come for a place to meet and chat and surf the web and just be among other people. It’s where I go when I want to be alone but not lonely.

Here in Savannah, we’ve got several that I like. If you’re ever in town, check out Gallery Espresso, The Sentient Bean, Origin Coffee Bar, Savannah Coffee Roasters or Franklin’s. Don’t bother bringing Sartre. Nobody will ask about it. Believe me, I’ve tried.