Et Cetera

Robin Hirsch (1956-61) founded The Cornelia Street Café in 1977. He describes the coffee bean’s odyssey from Ethiopia to Greenwich Village.

Manna of the Day

Iwas the last of the original proprietors of a particular kind of establishment that once had many flourishing examples not only in New York but also all over the Western World. They grew up as shrines dedicated to the worship of a little berry. From this little berry a drink was made. And with the consumption of this drink all kinds of interesting things began to happen.

But let us begin with a little history.

The coffee tree is indigenous to Ethiopia. It may also be native to that part of the world that in a gentler time used to be called Arabia. Certainly Arabs were cultivating the coffee plant as early as 600 AD. It was used initially in paste form as a food and in particular a medicine. Indeed, the first mention of it in literature is by the Arab physician Rhazes in about 900 A.D. By the thirteenth century, however, Arabs had discovered that a delicious drink could be made from the roasted beans of this plant and in the wake of this discovery coffee became a lucrative article of trade. Over the next few centuries it began to infiltrate the West. It was introduced into Turkey in the mid-sixteenth century, into Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth, and from there it spread rapidly all over Europe.

Houses for the consumption of coffee opened in Vienna in the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1650 in England an enterprising Jew known to history only as Jacob (Cromwell had just let the Jews back into England) opened the first English coffeehouse, in Oxford. Two years later, another enterprising immigrant, Pasqua Rosée, opened the first coffeehouse in London, harking back to its medicinal properties, and claiming in a handbill that coffee “quickens the spirits, and makes the heart lightsome ... is good against sore eyes ... excellent to prevent and cure the dropsy, gout, and scurvy,” and that, by way of reassurance, it was “neither laxative nor restringent.”

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the London coffeehouse had become a full-blown institution and all hint of coffee’s medicinal origins had fallen by the wayside. It was the great leveller. For a penny, men (not, however, women) of all parties and stations could gain entrance, glean the latest news, and drown themselves in a brew far headier than alcohol: political discussion. As Matthew Green wrote in The Spleen in 1737:

Or to some coffee-house I stay For news, the manna of a day, And from hipp’d discourses gather That politicks go by the weather

Drawn by the dissemination of news and the discussion of politics, people (sorry, men) were dropping in to their favourite coffeehouse five or six times a day, using it as a kind of office. It quickly became clear that business of a more formal kind could be effectively carried out in this informal setting. Trading companies and stockbrokers began to establish their headquarters in certain coffeehouses. Some developed long associations with a particular establishment. Few, however, can rival the shipping insurer, Lloyd’s of London, which began its life in (and took its name from) Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse on Tower Street, moved with it (and retained its name) when it moved to Lombard Street, and continued to operate its ever-expanding worldwide business from Lloyd’s for almost a century. Even when it opened its own building in the nineteenth century, having become a synonym for rock-solid insurance of every kind, it continued to conduct its operations under the name of a long-dead coffeehouse proprietor.

Another enticing aroma emanating from these egalitarian watering holes was cultural, in particular literary. At William Unwin’s (known as Will’s) on Russell Street, for example, the humblest carter, if he had a mind to, could hear the great John Dryden hold forth, almost single-handedly reshaping, by example and critique, the language of Donne and the Metaphysical poets into that elegant and measured tread which came to be called Augustan and which found its greatest flowering in the infant prodigy, Alexander Pope. And across the street, at Button’s, a generation later, if that carter were now literate, he could drop a manuscript into the mouth of the lion’s head which Joseph Addison, the great essayist,

In 1650 in England an enterprising Jew known to history only as Jacob (Cromwell had just let the Jews back into England) opened the first English coffeehouse, in Oxford.

had attached to the west wall to solicit submissions, and wait to hear (in person) whether it might be accepted for Addison’s burgeoning magazine, The Spectator.

Addison’s great rival and collaborator, Richard Steele, the other pre-eminent essayist and editor of the early eighteenth century, had correspondents in a multitude of coffeehouses and captured perfectly the marriage of the coffeehouse and culture in the first issue of his magazine, The Tatler (April 12, 1709), announcing in a preamble that he intended to include “Accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment ... under the article of White’s ChocolateHouse; poetry, under that of Will’s Coffee-house ... foreign and domestic news ... from Saint James’s Coffeehouse,” and so on.

The purpose and character of the coffeehouse was now defined. The drinking of coffee was of course a mere pretext. The coffeehouse had become and was to remain for almost two hundred years a meeting house, club, office, trading centre, gossip central, with political and philosophical overtones and a distinctly literary air. It was, at least in England, the great democratic institution, in contrast for example to taverns, alehouses, and so-called public houses. To this day some pubs retain a hierarchical class distinction between the public bar and the saloon bar (which is more salubrious, not to mention expensive). No such distinction was ever drawn in coffeehouses. Indeed a common code of behaviour contained in a set of Rules and Orders was posted in each coffeehouse. Of its thirty lines, the first six dealt with the equality of all customers, a startling and significant notion in a society which, ten years after Jacob opened his coffeehouse in Oxford, had seen the Restoration of the monarchy.

The democratic coffeehouse had its heyday, at least in England, in the eighteenth century. It began to fail, however, in the nineteenth, and not just for reasons of longevity. Its demise may have been inevitable (although pubs survived), but it was hastened by a conglomeration of social changes: the advent of home mail delivery, which reduced the need for a meeting-place; the appearance of daily newspapers, which reduced the need for direct reports of daily news; and the emergence of gentlemen’s clubs, which afforded men of a certain class a much more comfortable (and in some cases, permanent) home away from home.

The coffeehouse gave way by the end of the century to much grander incarnations called Cafés, where coffee and alcohol (and the sexes) mixed freely. One thinks of the Café Royal where Oscar Wilde hung out in fin-de-siècle London. One thinks of the great cafés of Berlin in the early twentieth century, like the Kranzler and the Kempinski, or the glorious cafés of Paris between the wars. But through war and peace, privation and reconstruction, glut and depression, the café, whatever its size, never lost its intimate relationship with art, philosophy, and politics. At Café Central in Vienna, Lenin held forth on the eve of the Russian Revolution – actually, since he was in almost permanent peripatetic exile, almost every café in Europe claims him. In Prague, Franz Kafka, hardly the most sociable of men, confessed to Max Brod that he had always wanted to open a café – fortunately or unfortunately, he never did. And in Paris, at the cafés that re-emerged after the Second World War, like the Deux Magots and the Café Flore, Sartre and de Beauvoir and Camus and Aron could be found formulating and reformulating the postwar philosophical and artistic Zeitgeist over their vin ordinaire.

The coffeehouse proper, however, re-emerged in America, and nowhere more conspicuously and to greater historical and social effect than for a brief and intense period in Greenwich Village, whose character it virtually defined. But that and Cornelia’s story is for another time. 