This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
It’s a hot summer’s day, and Francine Dixon is sitting outside her Brooklyn café watching customers enter. Among the passersby, a middle-aged woman wearing a plastic hairnet and smeared magenta lipstick walks across Malcolm X Boulevard toward the entrance.
“You see that one right there?” Dixon says, motioning toward the woman. “I’ll bet you a quarter she’s gonna go in and ask for food.”
Thirty seconds later, the woman walks out, visibly disappointed in the café’s light fare, and makes a beeline to the Chinese takeout restaurant kitty-corner to Dixon’s café. She emerges five minutes later chomping on half an eggroll.
“I get asked every day, ‘Ya got steak? Ya got eggs? A menu? Takeout? Do you have breakfast? Is this all ya got?’ ” she said. “People don’t really understand what we’re trying to do here. I want the people that get it.”
It’s been two weeks since the grand opening of Dixon’s establishment, TwoFiftyEight Café, and some of her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbors still don’t quite understand the need for a place that serves only gourmet coffee, smoothies and baked goods. Steps away from Bushwick, Dixon’s coffee shop is on the very edge of a neighborhood that was only recently anointed the “Next Hipster Enclave” by New York magazine, and it’s readily apparent that there exists a divide between the locals that see value in her newborn business – one that some say goes hand in hand with gentrification – and those that would rather have a Crown Fried Chicken (one’s being built a block away anyway).
“There’s not supposed to be two different worlds,” Dixon says, waving hello to a passing customer. “People didn’t know how to walk on this street. Look at it, it looks scary. It was filthy, it was horrible, but I had a vision. I’m probably making history without even knowing it.”
Named and styled with chalkboards and desks after the nearby junior high school that Dixon attended, P.S. 258, TwoFiftyEight Café is just the newest member of an increasing number of locally-owned coffee shops in Bedford-Stuyvesant – a growing family of independent ventures that distinguishes themselves from bodegas with smiles, remembered names, support of local events and artists, and the resolute goal of cleaning up a community that never leaves its own block. Yet café owners say the neighborhood’s budding coffee circuit reveals the need to persuade locals that some brews are worth more than a dollar a cup – and can help give the community a facelift, too.
David Williams, a longtime server at Fulton Street favorite Bushbaby, said the void for gourmet coffee existed to be filled when the café opened in 2005. Once patrons tried it – and Bushbaby’s signature homemade iced tea – they were hooked, he said.
“Coffee was just as much a learning experience for people in the neighborhood,” said Williams, who was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “The mentality is changing.”
Williams said the low light, carved mahogany and warm colors of the café was unusual on the Fulton commercial strip when it opened.
“People say this looks like it should be in the Village,” he said. “My response is, ‘It looks like it should be right here. Why should all the nice stuff be in the Village?’ ”
Hillary Porter, a baker by trade who has co-owned neighborhood stalwart Bread Stuy on Lewis Avenue with her husband Lloyd since 2004, said she sees her store as an amenity in a neighborhood that sorely lacks them.
“We can’t compete with 50-cent bodega coffee,” she said. “We provide coffee that’s fresh and not sitting on the burner all day.”
It took a show of trust between her establishment and the surrounding neighborhood to convince that a cup of coffee can be worth more in some places, Porter said.
“I have a no Plexiglas rule,” she said. “If you treat people like they’re going to do something terrible, something terrible might happen. Just greeting people when they came in surprised them.”
Efia Crandon, a business student at Nyack College who frequents Common Grounds café on Tompkins Avenue, said confused Bedford-Stuyvesant residents who are used to an overload of liquor stores and bodegas will soon wake up and smell the coffee for different kinds of establishments in the neighborhood.
“Sometimes I think some people don’t know what they need until it’s there,” she said. “It’s hard for people to adapt to change.”