Pouring over Providence

A critical encounter with community around coffee shops, told by those within

On n the kind of wet January day you learn to tolerate in Rhode Island, I found myself careening down Wickenden on foot, ritually reciting my name and an apologetic introduction. I had been assigned for a class to interview a stranger on the street for ten minutes—a lofty task for an introvert—and was prepared to speak with almost anyone who would agree to it.

In a troubled haze I entered The Shop, a café on a quieter part of the street. The space was small, oriented around a communal wooden table and lit by the day’s flat light. White noise from the espresso machine filled the spaces between the shop’s few inhabitants: a young mother with a stroller, a student with a laptop, two un-uniformed employees moving behind the bar. I ordered a chai from one of them, a young red-haired woman with whom I shared a first name. We exchanged smiles and pleasantries until I worked up the courage to tell her why I’d walked in.

“JP, you wanna take this?” She gestured toward a man working behind her at the espresso machine. “He likes to chat,” she said. Wiping down a counter, JP asked how long the interview would take; there were only two of them working, and he didn’t want to leave Cam alone too long. I told him I’d keep it short. On a bench outside, I learned quickly that getting incisive quotes from JP wouldn’t require much exertion on my end. Eventually, I asked him what kept him going in the business. He considered the question for a moment before answering definitively.

“It’s an intact form of communication. It’s something that you don’t get in many spaces. And there’s real community around that,” JP said. “Everyone talks about, ‘well, community, blah blah blah,’ as an amorphous, abstract concept, and I’m like, ‘no, dude, it’s just real in places like this.’ But American coffee culture is fast food culture. It’s Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and gas stations. But this still has a space. And this is an intact thing, you know?”

I left my first conversation with JP feeling ferociously optimistic about the state of the world and the trajectory of my life. Under the guise of the quotidian, local coffee shops offered something radical; they were progressive enclaves and beacons of community in an increasingly placeless world. Trudging through the damp back to campus, I was legitimately on the verge of tears, and resolved to write a nice, heart-warming article about finding belonging in shared spaces.

When I pitched the idea to my editors, I received a long reply back. They enjoyed the idea and thought it had a lot of potential. But, they wondered, rather than take for granted that coffee shops are the intact forms of community I posit them to be, could I grapple with the tensions between community-building and power within these spaces? At the end of the day, these were for-profit business ventures where prices were set, workspaces where wages were earned.

It was a damning blow to my visions of a mutualistic haven, made worse by the fact that the added nuance was intelligent and true. I recalled the specialty coffee shops that had proliferated in Harlem, augurs of gentrification in a neighborhood out of which my mother was forced to move. I considered the now wellknown national union struggles across coffee chains and shops. Optimism be damned—how could “real community” exist under these conditions? And for whom?

In the weeks that followed, I spoke with owners, managers, workers, and customers in coffee shops across Providence. At the beginning, I felt as though I had been charged with some great moral interrogation that would end with a determination of whether or not coffee shops could be places where “real community” existed—an assumption that, by the end, I would learn was yet another over-simplification on my part.

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Community Within

How does community exist in a business enterprise?

The first floor of Coffee Exchange is a caricatured patchwork of café dwellers. In one corner, a student frantically unburdens their fingers onto a keyboard. In another, a millennial couple leans over their pastries, rapt in indiscernible conversation. Near the door, an octogenarian sits with the crossword while peering over their nose through horn-rimmed glasses. (Later, when I ask Charlie, the owner, how to spot a regular, he offers cryptic advice: “Don’t focus only on gray-haired people. But, you know, don’t avoid ‘em either.”) By the wall, a woman has just opened her laptop and sips a tall latte. When I introduce myself, she offers an inquisitive smile, and tells me her name is Amanda.

Amanda hasn’t been to the café since before the pandemic—the space just reopened its indoor seating in November—but used to come regularly. She works from home, like a quarter of American employees, and seeks out cafés as frequently as she can. Laptop shut now, she tells me what the spaces mean to her. “A couple times a week makes a big difference for—frankly, for my mental health. Even though I’m not talking to anybody. It’s odd how much we as humans need to be in that kind of environment.”

Every shop I visit, customer after customer tells me the same thing: in one way or another, they find community here, in these places where warm goods are sold. Even if they speak to no one, even if they come alone—there’s something about the space that provides a ritual feeling of belonging.

In my own travels across the city these past few weeks, I’ve bought my fair share of hot chais and pastries. Of course, I’ve felt it too. For a moment, I am not a customer, but a neighbor; and this is not a transaction, but a familiar communication that just happens to require the exchange of fungible materials. The vitality of a specialty coffee shop is dependent upon this kind of ideological conversion. These are spaces that seem to reject the conditions of their existence in favor of something more communal.

When I sit down with JP again, a month after our first conversation, he puts a name to the qualities that Amanda and I both grasped at. “It’s what they call a third space,” he tells me. We’re perched across from each other, he on a stair step and I on a bench, inside The Shop just after closing time. “You know, you have your home, your work, and then the third space. You’re not going there for just a specific thing. You’re going to spend time. Coffee shops have always been third spaces.”

Third spaces are a concept constructed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg who argued that sites of public gathering—parks, barber shops, libraries, and, yes, coffee shops—are critical for civic engagement and belonging. The health of American community, he contended in the late ’80s, hinges on their preservation. In the 2000 book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam points out that third spaces have been in decline in the U.S. for decades now.

At the counter, a touch screen asks for my signature and tells me I owe $5.75 for my chai. I wince.

What does it mean when the “third space” in question requires a buy-in?

“We built the place in a spreadsheet, you know—we’re not not business-oriented,” JP admits to me. Still, he insists that profits are hardly at the helm of The Shop’s operations. “We had established our founding principles early on…We have three, and none of them are about maximizing revenue.”

Two owners I speak to, including JP, tell me they’re operating at the fiscal margin. “Being a space where people talk and spend time doesn’t drive revenue,” JP says. Some owners, at least, seem okay with that. “To be engaged in a business like this, I needed there to be a real foundation or reason for it to exist beyond the transactional selling of caffeine,” he says.

But there are hard limits to this philosophy. Not every coffee shop owner is able to afford the financial risk of operating at this margin. And even for those who can, the need to generate at least some revenue repeatedly forces coffee shop owners to compromise their community-centric values. Chloe, a worker-owner at White Electric Coffee Co-op, has reckoned with this challenge alongside her colleagues.

“It is hard when you need to make the money and also be this welcoming space,” she tells me. “We definitely struggled with that ourselves…We’ve had to raise prices just like everyone, because inflation is horrible. But we really held off for a while. We were just losing money and we’re like, we can’t—we had to do it. And it felt horrible.”

Chloe’s dilemma speaks to a deep complication in the kinds of third spaces given attention in America: mutualistic as they may feel, you have to pay up to join in. True, as Chloe later points out to me, a dollar or two for the cheapest menu option is a relatively small buy-in for a place where you can sit and stay for a day. But there are often other buy-ins required of customers—cultural ones—that pose similar problems.

Back at The Shop, JP and I are still discussing these complexities well past closing time. At one point, a man walks into the shop, coffee mug in hand. “Don, we’re closed, brother,” JP tells him. “If there’s still coffee in that pot it’s yours.” There isn’t any left, and as the man leaves, the two exchange friendly barbs.

JP turns back to our conversation. “There are a lot of things in coffee culture that can put some downward pressure on [community],” he notes. “Like saying, ‘oh, either you’re like one of us or you’re not.’”

(self-professed) valley-girl cadence. “That’s me,” she says when I tell her I’m looking for Chloe, and she offers me a coffee. I tell her apologetically that it would be my third cup of the day.

Chloe is the first worker I have spoken to since beginning my interviews, and as a worker-owner, even she is only partially so. Every worker I have introduced myself to has told me that they needed to speak to their manager before having a conversation with me. In one instance, an owner flat out refused my request to speak with any of his workers. “I don’t have my employees do interviews,” he insisted.

The same owner later agreed to sit down with me himself. We spoke for a long time about the community that existed within the shop; it was something he was very proud of. His refusal still fresh in mind, I tried to divert the conversation.

“And within your workforce,” I suggested, “do you feel like you try to create community there too?” He looked at me quizzically and furrowed his brows, sincerely considering my proposition. “I don’t think there’s any difference,” he said finally. “I think we approach customers and employees the same way. We’re all part of the same family, you know?”

I ask him to elaborate. He tells me about a café in his hometown of Pittsburgh, a “selfstyled counter-culture coffee shop” with an outward anti-capitalist brand. “They have business neighbors who are, you know, baby boomers. And I would watch as the person behind the counter would look and see someone they thought was like them and treat them very hospitably. And then someone who doesn’t look like them, who doesn’t fit the counter-culture image, would get treated completely differently.”

For one, political aesthetics seem to be as much a part of the specialty coffee shop business model as the coffee itself. But more importantly, these ‘aesthetics’ can be boiled down to two fundamental forces: race and class. The leftist, counter-culture ‘aesthetic’ is disproportionately white and college-educated, as are most of the customers in the coffee shops I visit, as are every single employee and owner I speak to—even in one of the most diverse cities in the country.

Coffee shops sell the idea of community well—and often do a genuinely effective job providing it to their patrons. But the community created, it seems, is usually a carefully-curated subset of the one that surrounds it, bound by constraints that cannot be easily shaken.

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How does community exist in a workspace?

The interior of White Electric, a worker-owned cooperative, looks exactly how you would hope and expect it to. Plants abound; a community board sprawls across an entire wall, while Black Lives Matter posters and pro-union t-shirts are mounted on another. At the counter, I’m greeted by a woman with curly blond hair and a

Every cafe owner I spoke to offered a similarly earnest account of their familial relationship with their employees. JP tells me about monthly staff dinners and celebratory meals after good business days. “Those were never team building exercises. They were just a way to be ourselves in a different way together…a way for me to actually not just be the business owner.” Neal, owner of Rise ‘n Shine, offers a similar perspective: “They’re called managing baristas. They have a stake in the place,” he tells me at a table outside his café.

These are workspaces that posit themselves as being revolutionarily familial—non-hierarchical, even—in an industry infamous for the maltreatment of its employees. It was an enticing idea, and I didn’t doubt the intentions of any of the owners I spoke to. But I wondered how a worker’s perspective might diverge.

Chloe began as a worker at White Electric nearly 20 years ago, long before the shop became a cooperative. In 2020, in line with cultural shifts induced by the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, Chloe and her co-workers signed a letter to their boss, the café’s owner, with a list of long-brewing complaints: racially discriminatory hiring practices, a lack of sick days, wheelchair inaccessibility. When he retaliated by threatening to fire everyone who had signed on, they decided to form an independent union—and succeeded.

Then, on the day of the celebration, something strange happened: “We went back to the park where we had a bunch of our meetings. We were having cake, we were all excited,” she tells me. “And then that night we got an email from the owner saying ‘I’ve put the shop up for sale.’”

Chloe and her colleagues had mused about the idea of a worker-owned co-op model, but before that moment they had never practically considered it. They were forced to shift gears quickly: “It was probably like within a day,” Chloe says. In the months that followed, they crowdsourced the funds necessary for a down payment on the shop—relying mostly on hundreds of small donations of around $50.

Chloe notes that when White Electric unionized and became a co-op, it wasn’t yet popular to do so. In the years since, coffee shops have been at the helm of a national labor movement responding to low wages and harsh working conditions. White Electric was the first unionized café in Rhode Island; this past summer, Seven Stars’ union gained voluntary recognition from their owners, and an unsuccessful attempt was made at a Warwick Starbucks, as the College Hill Independent previously reported. “Now it’s become more common, but it was a really big deal at the time,” Chloe says. “So I’m still very proud of what we’re doing.”

Since their transformation in 2021, the work at White Electric hasn’t come without challenges. But Chloe says that the business is more transparent, more democratic, and much more diverse—on the whole, “a more sustainable business model.”

The healthier working community seems to have deepened the sense of community within the entire shop. “I think customers have a sense of that. It feels nice to go into a place where you’re like, ‘oh, people aren’t, like, miserable here,’ Which is totally valid…because that is very much a very valid reality in many places,” she says. “It feeds into each other—having it be a nice community behind the counter, we’re able to hopefully share that on the other side of the counter too.”

The unionization movement makes clear that there is a severe lack of congruence between the communal values offered to patrons by cafés and those granted to workers—though the baristas’ organizing work seems to point toward a different future. Some of the most authentic communities that exist in coffee shops, perhaps, are built from the efforts that ensue.

Community Without

How do coffee shops change the communities that surround them?

When the Fishbein family set up shop in ’84, it was, as far as one sibling can recall, the first café in the area.

“We opened up…on New Year’s Day, 1984…We said we can make [the business] with strictly coffee and we can grow with the neighborhood—the neighborhood wasn’t so built up as it is now,” Charlie Fishbein tells me. “And we started with a hundred pounds of coffee.”

Today, Coffee Exchange is a mainstay of Fox Point, a neighborhood that once comprised a self-sustaining immigrant community and now is swelled with boutiques and specialty restaurants. With over 1000 reviews on Google, Coffee Exchange is also arguably the most popular café in Providence.

When I visit Coffee Exchange, Charlie seems reluctant to speak with me—he doesn’t usually do interviews—but eventually agrees. On a Thursday morning, we sit down in his office upstairs, the only quiet space in the café. He’s a soft-spoken man with a New England accent, neat white hair, and a cautious demeanor. As I ask him about the past, the shop, and his family, his face softens and he eases into his seat. He offers up a story about their reopening just three months prior.

“I had customers come in, and everyone was afraid that the place was gonna be different. It was gonna be like every other new place,” Charlie says to me. “And it wasn’t really—we made a few changes…but basically it’s the same. And customers came in and cried. It was a beautiful thing to happen and people, every day, all day long, are coming up to me congratulating me on what we did here.”

For the sake of disclosure: I do frequent Coffee Exchange (a lot). And I do, like many customers there, find some distinct comfort in the soft-green shingles, the old wood floors, the unmistakable feeling that there’s a cat lurking around somewhere (there isn’t, but there should be). The shop is quite literally a home and was one long before it housed roasters and espresso machines.

Prior to interviewing Charlie, I had heard about Johnny and Fama Britto through the work of filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, creator of Some Kind of Funny Porto-Rican?. The couple lived in the house now owned by Coffee Exchange until they—along with countless other Cape Verdean families and businesses in the Fox Point community—were displaced from their home in a wave of development projects. When I ask Charlie about who lived here before, he mentions the Brittos—he thinks there’s a plaque or a photograph somewhere outside that pays tribute to them. “Somebody sent us a note [saying] ‘this is where I was born.’ It was 1907 or something.”

Cafés like Coffee Exchange function as an anchoring force because place, as much as time, changes around them. These shops have sticking power in large part, perhaps, because the surrounding neighborhood must contort to their presence.

I ask Amanda if she has noticed cafés act as a displacing force in Providence. “Well, unfortunately, I do think [Seven Stars] did displace an old Italian-style bakery that was already kind of past its heyday.” But, she says, “I think people’s tastes changed. My observation was more that it came in at a time when those other types of businesses had lost their appeal to the communities…I don’t feel like it gentrified the area, really. I’m sure to some degree that happens.”

Looking specifically to Coffee Exchange, Amanda notes the effect the shop has had on Wickenden. “I’ve watched this strip here looking pretty sad for a while,” she says. “And it’s definitely brought in new businesses because of the activity of a coffee shop.”

Data attests to the fact that coffee shops are associated with gentrification. A study by the Harvard Business School found that “the entry of a new coffee shop into a zip code in a given year is associated with a 0.5 percent increase in housing prices,” though it does not conclude whether they function as symptoms or catalysts. So it’s not a question of whether or not coffee shops are part of the process that changes neighborhoods; instead, it’s a question of their role within it, functioning in tandem with other forces.

When I ask Charlie if, over the past forty years, he ever worried about the development of Fox Point displacing low-income residents, he considers the question thoughtfully again. “I don’t recall,” he says after some time. “I’m sure I felt that way. Or I was curious about it, but I don’t recall focusing on it at all. As long as there are people coming, I mean… students take over so much of the apartments along the street. It just didn’t affect us, you know?” I pay closer attention, looking toward those other forces. “There’ll always be students,” he repeats.

How do people conceptualize the responsibility of the coffee shop to its community?

The Fishbeins moved their business into Coffee Exchange some time after the Britto family was displaced from their home. Still, the founding of Coffee Exchange is temporally situated in the middle of a long history of city-planned development in the Fox Point area. Charlie confirms that before the café’s founding, the shops on the street were fewer, and certainly less boutique-y.

Amanda, long-time patron of Coffee Exchange and Seven Stars (which has been around for over 20 years), accounts for the change that these cafés have brought upon their neighborhoods.

“Interestingly, over the past 20 years, the coffee shops tend to stay; when other restaurants or businesses turn over, the coffee shops do tend to provide an anchor that the community kind of builds around,” she says.

Neal, owner of newly established Rise ‘n Shine, is a loquacious man with bushy brows and unruly white hair. When we speak, we spend as much time as anything else discussing the physical space the café is housed in; he’s proud of it, and for good reason. Neal has remodeled the old carriage house into an exuberantly welcoming space with white-shingle walls, exposed brick, and cozy pink accenting. By trade Neal is a professional contractor and real estate owner, and he tells me he owns several properties in Smith Hill—where he’s lived for 40 years now.

The website for Rise ‘n Shine touts that it “intends to jump start new life” into Smith Hill, a neighborhood it describes as “an incredible hidden enclave of the city.” A quick search on Google tells me that Smith Hill’s poverty and unemployment rates are above city averages. It’s also one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Providence.

When I ask Neal about the website, he tells me the neighborhood’s been “sluggish in terms of gentrification and economic development” ever since he moved in—that every ten years he’s declared that in a decade it’d turn around, and has bitten his words four times now. The café, he hopes, will change that.

“It’s been disappointing for me,” he says. “I call this my last ditch effort to jumpstart this neighborhood and see if that can really happen, like it did in the West End. I think it was pretty desolate there too. Now it’s full of beautiful little boutiques and cafés and bakeries and bistros and really cool stuff, you know?”

As we speak, I’m skeptical of Neal’s vision for revitalizing Smith Hill—frustrated even. Data from multiple studies show that gentrifi cation in the West End is actively displacing low-income residents. That somehow Rise ‘n Shine might be able to draw in new busi nesses and young professionals without pushing out the neighborhood’s low-income residents seems inconceivable. When I ask whether he worries about this possibility, he seems optimistic that he and several land-owning friends will be able to keep prices low for residents.

“What’s made it affordable is that there are several property owners here that have a hold on a lot of these buildings,” he says. “And we bought them early enough where we didn’t pay a whole lot of money. So we were able to keep the rent down. The philosophy is still affordable housing.”

“So that’s important to you?” I ask. We’ve been warm enough with each other that I feel comfortable digging deeper without insulting Neal.

“Yeah,” he affirms. “...I might call it a sophisticated boutique café, but it doesn’t mean that I’m doing this so that I can get $2,000 from the apartment. If anything, I just want this to be an attraction, to bring in another generation of buyers and tenants that can help support more commerce. We want other things to come in so that we have a really thriving neighborhood.”

Maybe I was missing the point of Neal’s vision; as we speak, he details plans for political events, workshops, and live music. Maybe there was a future in Smith Hill where the current residents could enjoy the added retail community, without being forced out. To help sort all this out, I enlisted the help of David Raileanu, Director of Red Ink Community Library—a different kind of third space. When I speak with him over the phone, he offers a surprising rebuttal to my initial concerns.

“Gentrification is not based on the price of a latte,” he tells me. “In my opinion, gentrification is more of a political process, one that starts at city council or in the state legislature, and is a very intentional decision that a political body makes in order to decide what kinds of people they want living in their communities.” He doubts that a small business could wield the kind of political power required to jumpstart this process.

To him, Neal’s coffee shop seems more like community investment—not gentrification. I ask him where he draws the line between the two.

“It has a lot more to do with where the value is coming from and where the value is going,” he says. He cites Red Ink, which was founded by local residents in a previously unoccupied storefront, as an example of investment.

I invoke Fox Point and the displacement of its once-thriving immigrant community; the neighborhood remains dominated by local businesses—not big chains—but it would be nearly impossible to argue that gentrification didn’t happen there. David concedes that it’s complicated. His point, he says, is more so that behind every gentrification process is political intent: “I think when a local, small business owner sees a potential opportunity to start a business in their community, that doesn’t happen accidentally.”

Fox Point, for instance, was specifically targeted by government-led development campaigns; its change was not just the product of the decisions of independent small-business owners, but of a systematic attempt to decompose the existing neighborhood.

Back at The Shop, toward the end of my conversation with JP, we turn to the neighborhood around us. The Shop is at the center of Fox Point, only a couple blocks from Coffee Exchange. He’s wrestled with what it means to hold economic power in this neighborhood that has undergone sweeping change. “The idea of communities getting to participate in their own revitalization and not just the wealthiest land-owning portion of those communities getting to make decisions about things is super appealing,” he says. But you just don’t see that happening—at least not in Providence. He adds, “I don’t know how to get there.”

Chloe echoes the point: “When I think about gentrification, the bigger issues are the cost of housing, that we need rent control— stuff like that, that isn’t necessarily something that we can do [something] about. But we can be vocal about it.”

Despite these systemic challenges, both JP and Chloe insist on their responsibility to wield whatever economic or social power they do have to benefit the existing community.

Outside of keeping their prices lower than what they could have, given their proximity to Brown and RISD, JP tells me candidly, “this business has not done a good job.” He cites homogenous hires and value-adding renovations. “I think there’s definitely a lot of opportunity to—not performatively, but actually—connect with the people who have lived here, or who do live here.”

A week after we meet at White Electric, Chloe emails me a list of community engagement projects they’ve undertaken: locally-sourced pastries and dairy, holiday toy drives for neighborhood families, coffee and pastry do - nations to local organizations and the community fridge, a bilingual Rent Relief clinic hosted in the shop—to name a few.

“Change is always happening,” David tells me. “The speed of it is controlled by the people who have the power to do so. So I don’t think it would be right for a small business owner or a landlord or a developer to throw up their hands and say, ‘there’s nothing that we can do about it’...They have the opportunity to choose—do we hire people from the community or do we hire people who work three towns away? Do we have hours that are conducive to the working class of our community, or do we specifically cater to people who don’t work? Those decisions are the kinds of decisions that either speed up or slow down gentrification.” What role a café assumes in its community, it seems, balances in weighted choices that require deep intentionality and care.

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On walks between interviews and moments between paragraphs, I’ve found myself quietly retracing my steps to look at what made all of this—the coffee and closeness and communal tables—feel so promising when I first spoke to JP, weeks ago now. At times it seemed absurd to bestow these shops with so much gravity, but even now their function does feel sacred and scarce. Bereft of cared-for public gathering spaces, the landscape of “third spaces” in the U.S. is dominated by these fraught private enterprises. Does that mean I should spite them? Resist them? Work to pin them down for what they are?

In truth, coffee shops are probably all of these things: profit-driven businesses and warm third spaces, exploited workplaces and trailblazing unions, gentrifying forces and community investments. That these meanings exist in tandem doesn’t exclude the possibility of belonging in coffee shops. These are imperfect models of community: spaces that seem to collectively reach out toward a more mutualistic future, but find themselves again and again beholden to the ordinary barriers against change. In so doing, they gesture toward what would be, or what might be, under different systemic circumstances.

That virtually every person I spoke to found something meaningful to parse out in the words “coffee shop” and “community” holds weight in and of itself. What that meaning sounded like varied—between owner, worker, patron—but it was there, lying beneath all of their words. When I try to place my finger on exactly what it is, I come up with something like ritual belonging—with tight strings and veiled boundaries attached.

CAMERON LEO B’25 has gotten more comfortable doing interviews since that fateful wet day.