To Be Known: small towns in a city

By Autumn Toennis

New York City has an approximate population of about 8.4 million. When my husband, Nik, and I made the decision to move here in 2019, we did so without knowing anyone included in that number— most of the move was made by the seat of our pants. No apartment? Answer: Stay at an Airbnb for three weeks and hope that we find something affordable. No way to pay for a lease? Answer: First find said-lease, and hope to find a job soon after.

We hit plenty of snags, but we found the home we have now, facing the bay, Manhattan’s skyscrapers just poking over the buildings in front of us. We ended up in our first jobs not long after that. Specifically, I ended up in a little café in Cobble Hill, called One Girl Cookies.

My boss, Dawn, started the business out of her apartment alone (hence the name), and as it grew larger she hired people; one of those people was a baker named Dave. He became her husband, and for the last fourteen years, their little café has sat near the intersection of Dean and Smith Street. In a place with this many people, I have discovered that there are towns within the city. Each neighborhood is its own community with its own staples, whether it’s the bodega on the corner with the best (and cheapest) sandwiches, the flower shop with the woman who always has a new nickname for you, or the café that everyone orders their birthday cake from. In Cobble Hill, One Girl Cookies (OGC) is that place.

But I didn’t know that when I started. There was an astounding number of people that came every day that my manager introduced me to, and I struggled to keep up with them. Most had been coming to the shop for well over a decade and knew more about the place than I did. Attached to the counter is a bar for customers to sit at and throughout the day, all of the regulars would shift through those seats. Slowly, I came to know not just their drink orders, but their families as well. Lee and Tad and their kids, Elinor and Charlie, live across the street, in a house with a red door. I could expect Tad for coffee nearly the moment I opened the shop in the mornings, and Lee for breakfast after her morning jog. When they were home from college, Charlie and Elinor would bring projects to work on at the bar in the afternoon. They would tell me what it was like essentially growing up in the shop, as they’d been crossing the street and coming in since they were very young.

Dana and Arthur, a couple who lived a few blocks over, came for breakfast every Sunday after grocery shopping at staggered intervals, and I saw Dana every morning before she left for work. There was Paul and Zoe and their little daughter, who I watched grow over the year I was behind the counter; Sandy, who could be counted on to order a black coffee and do the NYT crossword every day (successfully) without fail. There were the small business owners, the playwrights, the artists, the work-from-homers that preferred tables and would linger to talk with me as I poured their refills. And of course, the dozens and dozens of kids who would come in after school from the public school a block away.

The months came and went, and we began to settle into our place at this café. I say “we” because Nik spent nearly as much time there as I did, becoming a familiar face with the regulars; his job was two blocks over, and every day he came for lunch to sit sat at the counter with me as I mixed drinks and bagged sweets.

None of it happened overnight. But one day, as I was walking Lee and Tad’s dog and waving to people I knew were headed to the shop, I became aware of something. If you grew up in a small town, you’ve probably had this same feeling. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but it remains this: you are known.

Moving all the way across the country, away from that, was difficult. At home in Montana, I can walk into a grocery store and know the checker, or call the bank and know I’ll get a teller who went to high school with my parents that will inevitably ask who I “belong” to (read: “Whose daughter are you? Mike, Scott, or Mark’s?”). Leaving for a place of anonymity was an adjustment.

One Girl changed that. After a period of invisibility in the city, we had a community again.

I worked at OGC up until the first restaurant closures of the pandemic, and during that time, we were blessed with a small-town feel in the big city. We went to a group pie-baking party that was hosted in the kitchen for Thanksgiving; we had game nights with my co-workers at pubs; we went with a few regulars to the opening of the café my old manager was helming and then got sidetracked after that, adventure shopping in Japan Village in Industry City. We had people who knew if someone was sick in our family and asked after them, who were invested in my career goals and how they were progressing, who wanted to know the details of the wedding we were then planning, who stood up for me if a one-time customer was rude over the counter.

We are still in touch with many of the people there but everything has, of course, changed now. What has not is the gratitude I feel for what we were gifted with simply by answering a job ad for a barista in Brooklyn.

It is a curious magic, belonging.

AUTUMN TOENNIS is a writer and artist from Miles City, Montana. She graduated in 2014 with a degree in English Writing from Montana State University Bozeman, and has spent her time since then following words around the country and the world. Last year, she moved to New York City to pursue a career in publishing, and continues to work remotely for Open Country Press, a small, independently-run Montana press. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and a small windowsill orchard. You can follow her on Instagram @autumn_toennis, or find her at her Etsy shop, AutumnMarieArt.