There is a new coffee shop in Spanish Harlem. Housed in a renovated storefront in a decaying tenement near the No. 6 train subway stop on 110th St, Uptown Roasters opened its doors to the public earlier this summer. Uptown Roasters is sandwiched between another newly renovated storefront-hair salon and the same old Dominican barbershop I go to get my head shaved down to zero. Scaffolding is outside the building at the moment. The building is flaking paint all over and it appears some work is being done by groups of men wearing chalky Timberland boots. Other storefronts further down in the same building are basically like shells. Occasionally on my way home from the subway I will see Latino men squatting in lawn chairs outside these shells and chewing on food from the to-go containers on their laps. I have lived in Spanish Harlem – East Harlem – Spaha for 6 plus years. This is 110th and Lex, a place memorialized for pimps and hustlers by Bobby Womack and “Across 110th St.” Across from Uptown Roasters is the DeWitt Clinton Housing projects. But I am sailing and this was not intended to be a 2015 ode to Spanish Harlem.
Point of this is that I just had an experience that changed me and challenged my perception about race and gentrification—and I have been living in marginalized areas of NYC (the outer boroughs) for going on 20 years. I am a Howard Zinn white guy. It is not only the morally correct way to live, in light of the hundreds of years of injustices that White Europeans and then White Americans have perpetrated on people of color, it is just more interesting to be around people who come from different backgrounds.
O.K., O.K., back to the life changer.
When I walked into Uptown Roasters for the first time this morning, after months of sort of boycotting in my mind because this signified bad change as I was now deeply rooted in my marginalized neighborhood, which I also know is a highly flawed narrative (I am as much Spanish Harlem as the college kids from Michigan who live next door to us and just arrived in the big city at the beginning of summer). So as I crossed over from the street and entered the door of Uptown Roasters, the music of one of my favorite musicians was playing in the coffee shop, Elliot Smith. Probably my bodega self was expecting Bachata. Elliot Smith was such an expressive, soulful songwriter*, but his music seemed specific to people from a certain demographic and socioeconomic class. Uptown Roasters is one of these long narrow tenement shotgun spaces; the walls had been blasted and were now exposed brick. In the back, two young white kids were at a table and I could see a David Lynch looking guy typing on his computer. The coffee bar was unattended when I stepped in so one of the white kids, a tall boy in his twenties with a cap, sprung into action like a frat boy during pledge week. He smiled kindly, made eye contact and waited for the order. I asked the question,
“Do you have iced coffee?” Tall white boy said yes. What the fuck was this I thought to myself? The best, whitest, whiniest Elliot Smith song was on the speaker (“Miss Misery”). You couldn’t get more white-entitled than that. I couldn’t take it. Everything that gentrifiers do wrong is being done wrong at this moment in East Harlem. So I said something borderline stupid but yet kind and representative of my Midwestern upbringing.
“I love this song, but in the context of East Harlem I did not expect.”
And the tall boy looked back at his girl and said,
“Yeah this is a weird mix,” and he rattled off another song.
“This is the Elliot Smith Pandora station?” I asked
“Yes, we like to change over to jazz for Phil, he is a writer,” motioning with his head to the guy typing in the back.
And then because I liked the repartee I said, “Yeah, you don’t need words fighting with words.” There was more conversation and more friendly banter but the part I like is when I start asking him about the business: He wasn’t white like me. He was Peruvian. He and his girl back there were the owners of this establishment. They were not some college kids working the coffee bar. They were small business owners that knew about coffee. Holy crap I thought:
Turns out I don’t know shit. This is a beautiful place.
*As one story tells it Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the chest with a knife.