Tables for one: Farewell, Alt Coffee
(Found this image here.)
When I made my first attempt to move back to New York from Paris in 1998, I lived on St-Mark’s street near Avenue A. This was in the old days, when drug dealers acted as my security guard on the stoop. I lived with two and a half roommates (Jason would turn on the christmas lights in his window when he was available to spank girls during the sex act), in an apartment where I could see through the gaps in the living room floor to the apartment below. It was nothing personal, but I didn’t really like having roommates, so I used to go to another living room: Alt Coffee. There, I could sit on a seedy, cozy couch with my soy chai and read my “Futurological Congress.” Or sit at a dinky old computer and trade love emails with a kind of silly, unrealistic man (who forgot to tell me about his live-in girlfriend) in Germany. It was escapism, Alt Coffee was.
I was one of the contributors to the graffiti and sticker art in the bathroom. I’m one of those people so broke that I spent hours taking tiny little sips of my one hot beverage. I didn’t love the place: it was simply comfortable the way being at a friend of a friend’s house on a holiday can be. You sat there feeling like the one people might ask about later: “Whose friend was she?” When I moved back to the neighborhood in 2002, even though the rest of the neighborhood was already taking on the aspect of a hipster mall, it was still there for me when my two Italian roommates made life intolerable by watching “Sex and the City” on a loop all day long.
Alt is reopening as “Hopscotch,” which painfully (to me) and eloquently speaks of the patronage it will be catering to. No more strange vaguely homeless looking, but oddly confident and self-contained personalities. No more mystery, no more spiders from Mars. It’s true, I’d often go home rather than use the really disgusting bathroom, but maybe that should’ve been anyone’s measure of how long is too long to stay: if your bladder is bursting, you’ve been there roughly four hours. No, the new clientele will be stroller jockeys, and aunties of stroller jockeys. The last bastion of the gritty survivor who wouldn’t dream of living on Park Slope is gone. In fact, I think it wouldn’t be too facetious to call this a bit of Park Slope Spread.
Even the person bemoaning the “draining” away of the East Village’s “grit” in this New York Times article about Alt Coffee, seems to think that the place where Alt got its first furniture is a place called “Dumpsters.” How clueless is this city becoming?
Ah, well! I have no more time to complain! Life moves on. The gritty keep moving. I moved up to West Harlem where Starbucks died on 138th street and Broadway. The only gourmet coffee you can get here is at Vinegar Hill downstairs, where espresso is only a dollar and is served to you by my neighbors. It gives me hope for our neighborhood. For a little while, anyway.
