coffee, yesterday, today & tomorrow

Another view

One of my dear friends in Ca sent this our way.

(click to enlarge any photo)

One of many views of how we would change
our windows to attract attention. For awhile, that
poster on the left would go on the other window,
and many people would ask what it meant.
What could you say?

Where you see the yellow fabric.
We put benches near the window, in hopes
people would actually sit there. In the end,
only a few people actually used them.

We couldn't figure that one out.

For those new here, we had a coffeehouse,
circa Oct 31, 1999 - March 2003.

I received this from my friend Greg
@ Group 362 and it was hanging behind
our cash register.

When we searched to find equipment for
our store, Lisa found what looked like a
great deal in Nyak, NY. We talked to the
owner who had a store and closed it.

The owner of the storefront we were going to
rent, knew someone in Nyak who could look
at everything for us and at least let us
know how it all looked. Included in the sale
was a 2 group head Cimbali espresso machine,
marble tables, chairs, frig, pastry case, etc, etc.

It just so happened, the couple in NY, not only went
and looked for us, but they used to go into that
coffeehouse themselves. We did purchase the equipment
and it turned out the Cimbali was a great find. Once
it was cleaned out and tuned up, well, I won't bore
you with the details. For the price, we saved lots of
money and had a nice looking store to boot.

This is the note we received from Mark,
that looked at the equipment for us.
He later came out with his wife and we had
a very nice dinner with them.

These are only a couple of the articles
that showed a photo of the inside of
our place. Sorry about the quality of
the scan. The papers aren't exactly
printed on archival paper.

You get a sense of what it looked like though.

Notice the beautiful sign that Lisa printed?
We had a special, hence low price initially to
entice people who didn't know about
specialty coffee to try it. We started to notice
a few people only came in on that particular day.
We then changed it from day to day, and those
people then only came a few times after that.

Although you can't tell from these articles,
the floor was marble, as were the walls part
way up. We had to take out a rug that had
been on the floor for over 20 yrs. Paneling
was on the walls and we took that out
to expose the marble. Tin ceiling tiles,
which we had to replace a few of, and wood
was around the windows which also was
covered by the paneling.

Colleen is a Christian writer and we were
told she had written about us in her new
book at the time. Here are a couple of pages,
and the cover. My name was Steven, 'cause she
already had a Michael, darn. ; (

That's a small glimpse of our foray into the
business owner world. It's surprising just how many
things happened to us even before we opened.

We were to open in May, '99. As mentioned, we
weren't able to open until 10-31-'99.

But that's a whole nother story.