Fifty years before Starbucks...
Long before there was specialty coffee or Starbucks or even those old school coffee carts parked on every corner of manhattan, there was a very interesting coffee shop at 144 West 44th street.
In many ways it had everything we’ve come to expect in a coffee shop now; fresh roasted coffee, pour over coffees, communal tables, ways to get work done... only this was 1919.
Teddy Roosevelt is famous for drinking a gallon of coffee a day, and having a very large custom mug created to drink it with. But did you know his kids got together and opened a coffee shop that, get this, roasted their own coffee and served pour overs?
Remember, this is 1919.
Roosevelt’s sons Kermit, Ted and Archie, along with his daughter Ethel, her husband, and Roosevelt’s cousin Philip, opened a group of coffeehouses in New York City, long before Brooklyn native and Starbucks mogul Howard Schultz got the idea to bring European coffee culture stateside. They called their first coffee shop the “Brazilian Coffee House,” and their goal was to bring quality coffee to New Yorkers.
The Roosevelts (from left): Quentin, TR, Ted, Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith and Ethel. (Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs / New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
It was Kermit, then 29, who first pitched the idea to the other siblings.
Having spent a few years in South America (exploring the Amazon Basin of Brazil with his father and managing a bank in Buenos Aires), he became intrigued by the region’s coffeehouses, which not only served up fresh-ground beans but also had a much more leisurely pace than those in the States did.
The initial business incorporation in 1919 was called Café Paulista after a café in Buenos Aires that Kermit had frequented years before. The corporation launched the first coffee house, then located at 108 West 44th Street, calling it The Brazilian Coffee House as inscribed above the door in this 1919 photo (at the top of this post).
Coffeehouses were not new to New York but at the time, the idea of encouraging customers to linger was virtually unheard of. “Do the managers really intend to have their patrons stay beyond the conventional period required to ‘gobble and git’?” a bemused reporter wrote in the Outlook magazine. “Apparently they do.” Using premium, fresh-ground coffee was similarly rare. Most coffee served in restaurants or at home was preground and came in a can, or, worse, was instant—a habit picked up by soldiers who had taken the coffee powder with them during World War I.
The Roosevelts’ Brazilian Coffee House opened in November 1919 in a brownstone building at 108 West 44th Street to great fanfare (“Roosevelts Start Coffee House Chain; Houses Similar to the Ancient Institutions of London to be Established,” began a multitiered New York Times headline), with interior design reportedly handled by Ethel Roosevelt. The walls, papered with a green and gold print of Brazilian bamboo, were hung with portraits of celebrated coffee lovers, such as Voltaire (who allegedly downed 50 cups a day), Shakespeare and the Bull Moose himself.
Freshly roasted coffee ground per cup and served as a pour-over (Mildred & Philip Sawyer Papers / New-York Historical Society)
Thirty small oak tables and chairs were grouped around the room.
As an analog precursor to Starbucks’ laptop brigade, each table at the Brazilian Coffee House had a compartment furnished with ink, envelopes and paper (inscribed with “Brazilian Coffee House”). Dictionaries and encyclopedias (the free Internet of the day) were kept within reach. “What we desire to do,” Philip Roosevelt told a reporter, “is to provide a place for people to come, where they can talk, write letters, eat sandwiches and cake, and above all, drink real coffee.”
Coffee beans were roasted on the premises, then prepared at a large counter in the center of the room.
The cafe’s manager, A.M. Salazar, a young Brazilian, was an ahead-of-his-time coffee snob. He sniffed that Americans “don’t really know how to appreciate good coffee” and killed the taste by boiling it too long.
Salazar schooled customers on proper preparation with elaborate demonstrations in which he ground the coffee while they waited and poured water over a “specially prepared strainer.” Like the exacting, if at times insufferable, baristas of the 21st century, he lectured them on proper temperature and roasting. Salazar also counseled against adding milk or cream, which he felt caused indigestion, but he surrendered if customers asked.
Although it served light food including empenadas, he insisted the focus was on serving “real” coffee. He declared that Americans, New Yorkers included, did not know how to roast, grind, brew, or for that matter, drink coffee. Coffee that was boiled or percolated and left to sit around for over 30 minutes was equivalent to “tannic acid soup” in his estimation.
The timing for the Roosevelts’ venture was ideal: Prohibition hit two months after opening day, and coffeehouses filled the vacuum left by shuttered bars. “New York has to thank Prohibition for one blessing,” opined a writer at the Janesville (Wisconsin) Daily Gazette, “and that is the establishment of a modern coffee house, where it is possible to obtain a cup of coffee that is coffee and not tannic acid soup. It also has to thank the Roosevelt family...[for its] new and picturesque enterprise.”
The Brazilian Coffee House was forced to change its name in 1921. Salazar, it turned out, had once owned a Brazilian Coffee House on Pearl Street, and when he sold it, the new owners retained the name and served legal notice to the Roosevelts. Eager to avoid litigation, they settled instead on the Double R Coffee House, for Roosevelt and TR’s nephew Monroe Douglas Robinson, who had also joined the venture.
The Double R eventually grew to four locations in New York City, all named after South American regions: the original Brazilian branch, which moved a few doors up 44th Street, and survived a fire (TR’s widow, Edith, happened to be there, and calmly sipped her coffee as it was brought under control); an Argentine outpost; a Colombian (where thieves once tried to steal an oil portrait of TR); and an Amazon. The siblings planned on taking their chain national—Archie scouted sites in Chicago and planned similar trips to Boston and Philadelphia.
At one point there was some negation to have the Maxwell house purchase the coffeeshop, but this never panned out.
They ended up staying local, but the coffeehouses did achieve Philip’s wish of bringing different people together. The Brazilian location, in the theater district, was a favorite gathering place for actors, artists, newspapermen and musicians. Among its patrons was the then little-known purveyor of pulpy American gothic fiction, H.P. Lovecraft; his circle of friends, known as the Kalem Club, was known to frequent the Double R. Lovecraft even wrote a fevered ode, “On the Double R Coffee House.”
Here may free souls forget the grind
Of busy hour and bustling crowd
And sparkling brightly mind to mind
Display their inmost dreams aloud
Wondering what 112 West 44th Street looks like today?
Sources
Nosowitz, D. (n.d.). The Humble Brilliance of Italy's Moka Coffee Pot - Atlas Obscura. Retrieved December 6, 2019, from https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-humble-brilliance-of-italy-s-moka-coffee-pot.
Moka pot. (2019, November 27). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot.
Scan from Library of Congress file titled “Double R Coffee House.”
