(DECOMMISSIONED)

I was very pleased when I learned that a new coffee shop was being installed right near my residence. Looking back, I’m not sure how I allowed my expectations to be raised so. Located on the left bank of the Schuylkill, along a major east-west artery leading into University City, Walnut Bridge Coffee House is strategically sited to function like a trawl, scooping up Penn and Drexel students walking to and from campus, as well as service the anonymous loft-dwellers who live in the box across the street. Nevertheless, in the earliest stages of my brief relationship with Walnut Bridge Coffee House, I was still in the naive throes of relishing the pairing of ‘bridge’ and ‘coffee,’ and, overall, was looking forward to sampling this neighborhood cafe’s goods.

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On what can be described without hyperbole as one of the bleakest days of my life, I discovered Kaffa Crossing. I had just been released from 12 hours of hellish confinement aboard the Acela from Atlanta to discover that my luggage and bike had not been placed on the train and that I would have to return to 30th Street Station 24 hours later to pick them up. So, I was left to march into my newest place of residence, an as-yet-unseen room in a stained, ice-encrusted city in which I knew not a soul, supplied with only a backpack loaded with books and trail mix and a grocery bag loaded with my ‘files’.

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For those of us who were raised in circa-1980s South Floridian suburbs, terms like ‘outdoor market’ and ‘riot’ were first met in air-conditioned portable classrooms in between lunch periods and awkward square dancing sessions, which now, upon reflection, seem aptly Reaganian. The ‘outdoors,’ first of all, were intolerable places we made all efforts to avoid, skirting through fluorescent-lighted hallways and bays, following the whir of ceiling fans, living as if this planet were really not suitable for human life. I was six years old before I was removed from the incubator of my youth and granted opportunity to experience out-of-doors spaces. Thereafter, I endeavored to remain in the machines of convenience that would provide respite from the inhospitable swamp, for whenever faced with the prospects of having to weather the tropical clime, I would be struck by an insurmountable bout of torpitude, which would render me unable to do much of anything. One might think that such an ‘interior’ existence might provide precisely the conditions that would foster a healthy and critical life of the mind: while carried by one car to the next, from one Publix to another, what else does one have to dwell on? Is this not the ideal our 19th- and 20th-century revolutionaries had fought for? That one day the machine would liberate us from the factory and the field, and all would work towards a social utopia? But this comfortable, sheltered life inspired quite the opposite: a proclivity towards intellectual and political torpor grew in me.

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(DECOMMISSIONED)

Though I have entered Stellar during each of the four seasons, I always associate it with suffocation and heat. The space is confined and the music is unbearably loud and inappropriate for the notions of leisure with which coffee is typically consumed. Strobe lights and pyrotechnics would be more suited to the atmosphere of Stellar than domes of muffins and cupcakes. If you wish to have a seat, it must be on stools perched in a tiny loft hoisted above the espresso machine and under the faux-industrial ventilation armature. Refuge from the smothering interior can be sought in a few plastic chairs on the sidewalk, but the lack of shade and the heavily trafficked street merely completes the assault on the senses.

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Although it conflicts with my personal policies for traveling, I researched in advance to find a coffeeshop to visit in the 3 morning hours that I was going to be in Bismarck before heading west to Teddy Roosevelt National Park. I settled upon Green Earth Cafe, said to be where the ‘artsy’ Bismarck crowd gathers. I guess the artsies moved to Minot because Green Earth is now known as Urban Girl, a bead and accessory shop. As we wandered aimlessly through Bismarck, soaking up its bleak lack of conciliatory charm, which its southern neighbour Rapid City seemed to cultivate in a very self-conscious manner, we saw only empty skies, empty sidewalks, and stripped down signs of utilitarian survival.

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Running late for a sketchy bike deal in central New Jersey, having been led by crooked directions along 20 miles of surface streets to the ‘Highway 30 U-Haul’ storage facility, which, when google-mapped, is neither in the town named by the seller, Amadeus, nor in the town mentioned in the name of the storage facility, I glare across the median to my left as I speed past the entrance to the facility. Four miles down the road, I come to an intersection where I can make a left turn — a rarity in New Jersey — from the highway into a neighborhood where an illegal u turn is simpler to negotiate before flooring it along the previously covered miles.

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What are we at the crossroads of here, the cinematic aspect ratio of this tight little neighborhood as the sun goes down and the little plays begin, each in their own spotlight, pressures me to draw conclusions about the disconnects between characters and props in the city, yet all I can do is rub the night in between them and hope to return someday to give them my answer.

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There is a nice phenomenon in some cities, it may be in all cities except Atlanta, but particularly I am thinking of Portland, OR and Seattle, WA, where small intersections deep within residential districts swell slightly with a commercial hub. In the pleasant iterations I have encountered they both contained coffeeshops and idiosyncratic eating establishments as well as convenience grocery shopping, and in the Portland variation, an old movie theater that was at the time showing Night of the Living Dead, which we had trekked there to peep.

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I am completely aware that one of the policies of Cafe Tableaux is to not review establishments whose sole focus is to serve food. I am also aware that many of these policies are potentially dooming the site to failure, although not that rule in particular, so I am using an executive privilege to register kudos to a well-deserving establishment that merits being recognized in all forums that could even tangentially apply to it.

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As an ‘architect’ I regularly struggle with my fluctuating attention to the specificity of designed environments. I realize that every manmade condition is ‘designed,’ and so are many so-called natural settings. The way in which my attentions shift are as follows. Certain conditions exist in such a way that they trumpet the human ingenuity that wrought them, materials are used in new ways, environments are tailored toward specific atmospheric effects, furniture, colours, and fixtures are composed with the space toward a tableaux that begins to have a voice, a recognizable, if not understandable, enunciation. These are self-conscious designed conditions, and as they beckon appreciation from the world-at-large, they invite scrutiny from me.

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As a lad I grew up at the beach, on a barrier island astride the Atlantic Ocean along Central Florida. All the memories of my childhood are infused at some level with blinding white sun, the smell of salted air, flat topography, and a sense of ease that comes with the slow pace of seaside life. There were elements of exertion and tension, yet, I distinctly remember saying, well into adolescence, that I did not know what stress was.

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