I moved to New York from Seattle in April 2012. NYC has a reputation as a city which has everything, but after having visited 100 coffeehouses here over the past few years I am sure that Seattle has the better coffee culture. I miss it. I just visited Seattle again a bit over a week ago, and I was thinking about what coffee meant to me.
When I left Seattle in 2012 I had been living on 45th Street in U District for some years, and in U District for most of my time in Seattle overall. In whatever travels I have had, I have not seen a cooler place to live than the area around The Ave in U District. I was staying in a 4-bedroom apartment where our rent was $1000/month, so my part was $250 a month. I spent more money on coffee in many months than I did on rent. Where else in the world other than Seattle do people do that? When I moved to Seattle in 2001 I had never had coffee before. First I did not understand coffee, then I tried it sometimes, then I wanted to have it but never could afford it, and later when I had a steady income I embraced the coffeehouse culture.
One of my first visits to a coffeehouse was on the Ave. I had not been in Seattle so long, but I was curious about new sorts of places and visited a few coffeehouses to see what happened there. Someone at a coffeehouse commented on my Texas accent and we started talking. I asked a group of people why Seattle people drank so much coffee. He told me that it was because it rained so much in Seattle, and the rain makes people damp. If they are damp for too long, then the soggy condition weakens their bones. Coffee dries the dampness so that people can survive in a rainy place. I did not know what to think of this. Eventually I started going to coffeehouses to study, read, write, or do any sort of thing that one might do sitting at a table while thinking hard.
The coffeehouse in Seattle has its own culture. A coffeehouse might be someone’s office, and people might openly tell others their coffeehouse schedule and expect that people will arrive without further notice to meet them at a coffeehouse for regular visiting hours. I met many new people at coffeehouses. Strangers regularly approached me and I regularly approached strangers, especially with regard to collaborating on activist issues. It was expected that coffeehouses were a place for discussing community concerns, and it was expected in Seattle that anyone with free time would identify community concerns and raise them in discussion at coffeehouses.
Coffeehouses hosted concerts, lectures, discussion groups, nonprofit meetings, social gatherings, and were a general place for starting discussing among people for any reason. My favorite coffeehouse is Café Allegro in u-district. It was huge, in a great location, has amazing history and cultural impact, and the management has always been supportive of activist meetups. I think back fondly on conversations that I had there, and how individual conversations there have changed the direction of my life. Allegro is where I organized Wikipedia meetups, and in that location, I met other Wikipedians for the first time at the meetups that I organized. Now that I have met other Wikipedia contributors, I know how uncommon it is to start in-person Wikipedia events, and how very uncommon it is for a person to start in-person Wikipedia organization without first participating in a Wikipedia organization. If Café Allegro had not been so good to me, and if coffee did not flow in Seattle to the extent that it did, I would not have thought to advertise Wikipedia meetups in Seattle and might not have taken an interest in Wikipedia as I did.
At Café Allegro, I learned about the place of clinical trials in society, learned about community bulletin boards and all the kinds of events that can happen in a city with neighbordhood culture, learned about Wikipedia from other Wikipedians, first heard about open access, first heard about Aaron Swartz’ criminal charges, first heard about open science, had a lot of talks about gay culture and organizations, and met lots of people to talk about India. I had many conversations about coffee there. We would continually flip out appreciating the coffee. So many times I had deep conversations with friends and strangers there learning about other people’s field of expertise. Conversations there never seemed to be causal, and all the time I spent there felt like an accomplishment. For the price of a cup of coffee – which was a dear expense to me for much of my time in Seattle, and a serious cost for me to contemplate – I consistently had good experiences there. I look back and remember also hoping that someday I would be “coffee rich”, which was a term I imagined to describe a person who could go into a coffeehouse at any time and afford a cup of coffee. I regret being shy sometimes about going in without being able to afford coffee. I always followed the custom of buying a cup of coffee as a price of entry, so there were times when I wanted to visit but since I could not afford the coffee, I stayed away. Looking back, I have mixed feelings on missing out of some experiences, but also now I have a better understanding of the pain of missing out. I also have an understanding of what it is like to want coffee and not be able to afford it, because in my current professional circle, almost no one comes from a background which can imagine an economic class of people who would aspire to be “coffee rich”. I am still grateful that now in my professional development that I can buy coffee when I want to have it, and I am sensitive to detect anyone who is unable to afford coffee as the price of admission to social events.
I cared enough to start the “coffee in Seattle” Wikipedia article. I hope that Seattle can keep its coffeehouse culture, and that it is always accessible even to people with less money. I still feel very at peace visiting any coffeehouse anywhere, and I enjoy sharing coffee at coffeehouses with my colleagues and loved ones.