IF YOU lived in Cobble Hill and wanted to taste the burned-to-a-crisp goodness of Starbucks coffee, you used to have to schlep to Brooklyn Heights.
Not anymore.
Starbucks is about to hoist its oh-so-familiar standard on the south side of Atlantic Avenue. For this neighborhood, this is the equivalent of Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
And for better or worse, there’s probably no turning back.
The Starbucks under construction at the corner of Court and Dean has yet to sell its first $4 latte, but people up and down Court Street are buzzing. One local gadfly, a professed admirer of the French anti-McDonald’s crusader Jose Bove, is threatening to picket.
Recently, as his Court Street cafe was breathing its last, Roberto Gautier posted a call to arms on his window. He urged his patrons and neighbors to rise up against the Seattle-based coffee behemoth’s encroachment into Cobble Hill – heretofore free of chain restaurants.
Gautier couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday, but he recently took his anti-corporate crusade to the wider public in a sympathetic Times interview.
Some neighborhood gadflies say Gautier’s cafe might still be around if he had treated his customers better and spent less time using his cafe as a forum for cranky Nader-style politics.
“It’s politically correct, especially in a landmarked neighborhood, to keep things as they are, even if that’s not good for business and the people who live there,” says area real-estate broker Carl Peek. “But you can’t turn the clock back.”
The clock has been moving forward quickly in Cobble Hill, particularly along Court and Smith streets, where it seems a new restaurant opens every week.
Regarding the boom here, Peek, managing director of the William Ross agency, says, “I’ve never seen anything like the past two years here in my life.”
Change this rapid causes pain and dislocation. Rents are going up dramatically. Starbucks didn’t make this happen. Somehow, though, the imminent hanging out of a Starbucks shingle is psychologically potent.
“A lot of these mom-and-pop shops are really worried,” said a clerk at a Carroll Gardens pastry shop. “They hadn’t had to change in 40 or 50 years, and now this.”
But if mom and pop brew a lousy cup of java, should their mediocrity be subsidized for sentimental reasons? Why should Starbucks be despised for doing what many people consider a good job?
“The fact that Starbucks has now become so big could be because they serve good coffee at good prices – well, not at good prices, but good coffee,” says David Brooks, senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Brooks’ recent best seller, “Bobos in Paradise,” is a study of the class of urban professionals who have migrated to Cobble Hill in recent years. As a former resident of the historically Italian enclave of Carroll Gardens, he agrees that the coming of Starbucks south of Atlantic Avenue is symbolically important.
“What it means is the decline of ethnic identity and the hegemony of cosmopolitan, educated-class types,” he says.
Though Bobos tend to have moral reservations about patronizing chains, Brooks says his research shows that “the guilt about the power of the large corporation is overcome. People do end up going to these places.”
Moms especially. Felicia Kokinos says the familiar green-and-white Starbucks sign was a “reliable beacon” to her when toddler Claudia was at the breast.
“I don’t particularly like their coffee, but I always went to them when I was looking for a place to nurse,” she says. “They always had reasonably clean bathrooms, and a comfortable place to nurse.”
Her views should be cheering to those neighborhood Starbucks competitors – like Sweet Melissa and Mazzola – who have a loyal customer base because they do a first-rate job caring for their customers.
It seems unlikely that rational consumers would pay the ridiculously high prices Starbucks charges for its coffee and pastries as long as locally owned cafes provide the same quality products for less money.
Kevin Cody, owner of Cody’s Ale House Grill across the street from the nascent java giant, has continued to prosper during the great Bobo migration by changing his menu to fit the neighborhood’s changing tastes.
And having weathered a couple of business cycles here, he’s excited to see the Starbucks open. Cody sees it as a sign that economic stability is here in Cobble Hill to stay.
“You don’t ever hear about a Starbucks going out of business,” he says.