Caffe Reggio is my everything
4/6/21
Caffe Reggio has been my go-to since I “rediscovered” its magic when I finally firmly planted my roots in New York. Having tried to move to New York several times in my early twenties (none of which quite worked out), Reggio only lived in my dream of what New York was. One weekend during my freshman year of college in the late nineties, my friend Linette and I took the Chinatown bus from Philadelphia to New York to visit her uncle and his husband. They were the quintessential New Yorkers, her uncle was a hair stylist at a fancy salon, his husband a set painter. They were casually cool without trying, and took us young yokels around the West Village for a day of exploration. They took us over to Macdougal Street, which hadn’t been totally taken over by NYU quite yet, it still had remnants of its bohemian past, deliciously run down which I found extremely exciting. We landed at Caffe Reggio for cake and coffee. I was so overwhelmed and starstruck by the city, that I paid no attention to any semblance of its geography, names of streets or businesses. I was too in love to care about details, I didn’t pay attention to where I was or what it was called. All I remembered was the brightly lit bakery case, and the twirly wrought iron ice cream parlor chairs that I assumed were bought when the cafe opened in 1927 (historic photos support this, although the chairs do not support my aching back). When I moved back to New York for grad school years later, I spent weeks combing the city looking for that brightly lit bakery case and ice cream parlor chairs. I had no idea where to start, so after class I’d pick a neighborhood and walk up and down its streets. A month or so later I turned the corner off West Third down Macdougal, and recognized the green awnings that would soon become a regular part of my life.
Reggio became the place I’d bring second dates to impress them with my knowledge of New York history. It’s where I’d go alone, to read a book over a latte, to FEEL New York history (it’s where I would indulge myself to feel a part of New York history as well). This history found its way into the pages of my book about New York art history, which I (of course) edited from my favorite seat- just inside to the right, on a fifteenth century bench that once belonged to Lorenzo De Medici, which faces the cafe’s pièce de résistance, a glorious sixteenth Century painting from the school of Caravaggio. I felt an extra sense of serendipity, (and dare I say purpose?), as my pen struck across my print out of page 61, which was several paragraphs about my love of the art historical treasures inside the brown and green walls in which I sat.
I still use the cafe and it’s now extended outdoor tables set up across three precious parking spaces as an office, a meeting place, a study hall and often a muse, sometimes all over one single cup of coffee. Of course now, the view of my favorite painting is obscured by varying levels of plastic screens meant to keep each table’s inhabitant from spreading germs. I have since taken my practice outdoors, preferably to the southernmost table that hugs the building and shares a railing with Mamoun’s Falafel next door.
Now that New York is easing into normalcy, Reggio has come alive again with oodles of eighteen year old NYU students, who order beers awkwardly, but hold the bottles proudly as they take each exhibitionist sip, making sure every passerby KNOWS they are “of age.”
The old men and hippie types I used to sit amongst inside are likely staying in while the weather still borders freezing, but I find myself just as at ease amongst this younger crowd. They seem to traipse back and forth along MacDougal on loop, looking for action of any kind. I secretly hope they will notice the effort I put into my outfit just to sit there. Occasionally a young woman will yell “I like your style!” as she passes me, which at 41 equates the highest and most coveted of compliments (other than a step further, the rare- but magical- compliment from a teenager. This is of course highly unlikely but has been bestowed onto me a handful of times.) I don’t normally feel old until I am reminded of my otherness by the sheer youth of these Complimentors, and when it does happen, I feel like I’ve somehow lived my life right, like it all accumulated to this exact moment in time when a near-child twenty years younger than I has validated my existence. I can’t decide if this is an empowered thought, or something I should be worried about.
It happened just before I began to write this. I decided it was a reading day, where I absorb writings on New York by authors from varying points across time in hopes it will inspire me to write my masterpiece, but my muse today was my own ruffled ego. In effect, I did not bring my iPad, and instead scrawled these nearly 1000 words into an unlined notebook I usually carry but rarely write in. My hand is cramped from the scribbles that my handwriting has devolved into over the past decades that I have been writing, a mix of printing and cursive (that I honestly can barely read as I transcribe).
I shifted in my ice cream parlor seat and caught a glimpse of myself in the cafe’s curtained window, startled by my hunching posture and the realization that I looked exactly like the middle aged people who would loiter at my local coffee shop when I was a teenager. Really, they could have been 30, but I assumed they were all over 50 and lonely. Usually dressed in all black, they would scribble and scribble in their little notebooks, seemingly consumed by whatever was coming to life on their pages. In turn, they would often be the brunt of my jokes and ridicule. I felt sorry for them, all alone with nothing but their own thoughts and several cups of coffee. They were never with friends, and never acknowledged each other, let alone looked up from their pages. The full circle feeling of this scene is not lost on me, but now I realize what I mistook for loneliness was more likely a self-care indulgence of precious time for oneself that is a rarity in adulthood. My hand aches from my own scribbles and my back is on fire from slouching, but at least my version of the feared middle aged person alone at a cafe comes with art historical paintings and more importantly (?) — the validation of anonymous college students.
Livin the dream.
