No Place for David
30 March 2008David's Coffee Place in Hillcrest has a rear patio and some sort of back room which have long provided meeting places for chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations. Yester-day, I learned that the new owners have applied or will be applying for a license to sell beer and wine. To-day I saw a notice on the front door declaring that, beginning on 1 May, the patio and back-room will be remodelled and no longer available for such meetings.
The notice also indicates that Babycakes is imagined as a bakery and bistro.
David's Coffee Place has been around for about 15 years, but it has only been a few weeks since I started hanging-out here. Now it is apparently to be gentrified. Perhaps I should be glad that I didn't have more time to get attached to it.
Up-Date (2018:01/30): Someone informed me of a change of the domain name for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've editted the entry to reflect that change. That same someone asked me to include a link to a resource hyperlist from Comlumbus Recovery Center for those dealing with alcohol addiction. That's a bit tangential to the original purpose of this entry, but….
Tags: Babycakes, David's Coffee Place, Hillcrest
I think it is a shame that they are changing things around given the history of the place as a not-for-profit establishment. I doubt that it will be a good business move either given that that association with the current business will be lost and that some of those who attended meetings there surely would have become customers as well.
An interesting aspect is that, while its first owner ran it as a , he was bought-out after a few years and the place was run as a for-profit for about a decade while holding onto the notion of accepting and serving the same people.
I don't really have a good feel for whether the new owners hope to hold onto the existing clientele indefinitely; what is plain is that these new guys have that are going to crowd-out some of the function of the place.