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Cafe Society

After three decades, a Collegetown fixture serves its last soy latte

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It’s the final Friday night at the ABC Café and things are a little unhinged. A woman is breast-feeding her infant on the restaurant’s front stoop. A couple of grungy guys are hanging out; when I ask if they mind me taking their photograph, they crack wise.

“You with the FBI?” one asks. “If I was, would I ask?” I say and tell them I’m documenting the last days of an Ithaca icon for Cornell Alumni Magazine.

“Oh, that’s cool then,” a bearded guy in a Fidel Castro cap says. “We’re down with that.”

ABC Cafe storefront

Photo: Franklin Crawford

Around the corner on Osmun Place a large blue bus is parked illegally. Inside, several members of an all-white reggae band are either toking up or spreading blessings to the four directions with something that smells a lot like reefer.

I poke my head in. They are the featured act at the café that night.

“Mind if I take a picture?” I ask a man and a woman with dreadlocks wrapped in fabric and stacked like hornet’s nests on their heads.

“Are you with the feds?” one of them asks.

About thirty years ago I was a long-haired, grungy, all-purpose kitchen dude at Cabbagetown Café, a veggie joint on Eddy Street. We were proud of our food and the generous portions we dished out to crowds that stood in line for our homemade fare. Our main competition was Moosewood, a cooperative composed of people we considered to be veggie-snoots. They produced “gourmet” vegetarian. Well excuse me. A soy loaf is a soy loaf, for crying out loud.

Then around 1980, a little joint opened up on Stewart Avenue calling itself the ABC Café. We scoffed. Back then, the place was sofas and upholstered chairs, coffee, tea, light fare, and late hours. It was never going to make it. We waited eagerly for signs of its demise.

Then a Chinese American guy named Lawrence took over the place and turned it into a functioning restaurant. Still we laughed. This runt of a wannabe would go belly-up soon enough.

But it didn’t. ABC added entertainment. Word spread they had a happening Mexican food night and a good, cheap brunch. They hired a baker, and he started cranking out some pretty tasty desserts. They scored a beer and wine license. Feh! It would never outlive Cabbagetown!

We were wrong. Cabbagetown closed. ABC held its own. As Moosewood rose to national prominence, ABC quietly kept doing its Ithaca thing, promoting local music and encouraging people to get their lights out from under a bushel on open mike night. It stayed afloat owing to a crew of dedicated staffers, most notably Ken Hallett, who handled the lion’s share of the work once Lawrence hit the road.

patrons at the cafe

Photo: Franklin Crawford

Hallett’s tenure lasted twenty-eight years, pretty much nonstop. Although it was a cooperative venture, it was not uncommon to see Ken between lunch and dinner shifts, bopping around town in his trademark black Converses, putting up fliers and posters promoting the café. Or you might find him at a Common Council meeting battling with City Hall when it cracked down on venues that advertised their gigs on telephone poles.

ABC attracted a more diverse crowd than most restaurants in town. You were as likely to find a hippie farmer as a professor or student, a would-be artiste as a working stiff or retired postal clerk. It became a place to bring family. Sure, we all stank of whatever was being cooked while we ate there—tamari and garlic most of the time—but that was part of the ambiance. The prices were reasonable, the portions hefty.

Piano player

Photo: Franklin Crawford

The clientele were mostly—but not all—Lefties. And that made historical sense: the storefront once housed the Glad Day Press, a radical outfit with links to the SDS, later known more for its fine silk-screen posters and lithographs than for its political screeds. The pressed-tin ceiling of the café spoke of its origins as a soda fountain. Next door, for as long as I could remember, there was a laundromat—and more than once I tossed in a couple loads and grabbed dinner during the spin cycle.

For a time I hosted the open-mike nights, and good nights they were. The most haunting fifteen minutes of my brief tenure as emcee happened when a local transvestite of some repute showed up to sing along with a boom-box; she listened to the music through headphones with the accompaniment on cassette. It went well enough for the first song. During the second, the speakers died but the music was still audible to the singer—whose voice was, to be kind, fragile. The place was packed and what followed put the hairs up on the back of my neck. A crew of sozzled frat boys, who had coaxed a member into going up and telling dirty jokes, went mum. No one moved. Even the dishwasher stopped piling plates. The frail quavering voice continued a capella through an unmercifully long torch song about unrequited love and angels and dying. The soundman pleaded with me to do something.

“No,” I whispered. “This is what it’s all about.”

food not bombs banner

Photo: Franklin Crawford

The singer got a standing ovation. In 2001 Hallett and company expanded the café into the laundromat, which had closed. He took out a loan and paid for a lot of the labor on food credit, more or less in perpetuity. The kitchen was moved into the back of the house and upgraded. You could get coffee and snacks in the new space and leave without smelling like stir-fry. It looked like ABC was ready for the twenty-first century.

But the place never built up the traffic it needed to pay its debts. A few years ago some new owners came along; portions got a tetch smaller, prices higher. Hallett stayed on as a worker and exhausted himself. The recession hit and ABC was in trouble. In June, it was announced that the café would close at the end of the month.

On a stormy Monday after the final Sunday brunch, I found Hallett alone with a notebook, nursing a coffee, trying to staunch the bleeding accounts. He still had a vested interest in the place. Fliers were posted asking for bids on ABC memorabilia—signs, menus, odds and ends. There was talk of a pizza joint opening next door, of buyers who might be interested in bringing the place back to life.

ABC earned my grudging respect— and with time my loyalty, even love. I frequented the café less and less over the last few years, but it was an anchor, a fixture in my inner GPS. I think of the people I met there who remain dear friends today. There was a vestige of the hippie ethos, a tidal pool in the backwash of the Sixties: ABC was a place where lots of hair was still totally cool. Much of the “question authority” attitude was pointless and a little silly—why would the feds show up to take pictures saying they were with Cornell Alumni Magazine? Still in all, the place was home to folks of every stripe. For these and many other reasons, it will be missed.

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