For 400 years, coffee has fueled the 24-hour metropolis (but it wasn’t always so fancy.)

Some may ask, “Is coffee really an iconic New York drink?” To those I respond: Are you nuts? We’re talkin’ the city that never sleeps! New Yorkers work hard, play harder, race everywhere, meet and eat at all hours of the day and night. It’s a city in constant motion, where (as the songs say) people ride in a hole in the ground, making it here so they can make it anywhere. Pressure? You bet...packed calendars, sirens, jackhammers, beeping phones and grab-and-go meals are all intrinsic to the Big Apple lifestyle. New York without caffeine is not only unthinkable, it’s untenable.

Gothamites can’t survive without coffee. If they’re not carrying it, they’re on their way to get some. Coffee is close-by at all times, available from street carts, bakeries, delis, luncheonettes, diners, bodegas, doughnut shops, fast food joints, hotels, theaters, gyms, gas stations (if you can find one), hundreds of roasters/sellers, and, of course, every workplace everywhere. Even my dentist has a k-cup machine in his waiting room (then he charges extra for whitening my teeth.) New York has more coffee shops per capita than any other American city.

There’s yet another reason why coffee is iconic to New York. If your “java” wasn’t bought or sold in NYC, it probably passed through the city’s ports and warehouses. It may have been traded on the commercial market that originated in Manhattan, or used roasting methods, equipment or packaging invented here. For centuries, New York has been the seat of the coffee industry. (Select to enlarge:)

But what about that other coffee town?

You mean that place way across the country in the Pacific Northwest? That “city” surrounded by boats and mountains? I don’t want to mention it by name. I’ll just say it starts with an S. And the Mariners play there.

Anyway, Seattle...oops, I said it...did indeed originate the single-service espresso drink revolution with Starbucks in the 1970s, and it swept the nation. If you’re under the age of 50, you probably don’t remember a time without vente mocha latte macchiato with oat milk and salted caramel foam with your name misspelled on the cup.

You may wonder where New Yorkers got their coffee before this barista invasion. How did they survive without flavored foams and misnamed cups? For many decades, they got their brew from their neighborhood coffee shop. There was at least one on every block, usually more. We are going to celebrate these beloved establishments (some still exist) in a little bit. But first, some history.

How did New York get this way?

The European colonization of the eastern seaboard began in the early 1600s. Boston, Philadelphia and Jamestown were settled as devout “theocracies” by religious refugees from England: Pilgrims, Puritans and Quakers. In the middle of all this piety was New Amsterdam (New York), founded by a huge international corporation: the Dutch West India Company. We’ve been a “company town” ever since! The surrounding God-fearing colonies disdained visitors and demanded strict compliance with biblical laws. But the Dutch had come here to make a buck, so anyone from everywhere was welcome to sail into the harbor and make some deals. Boom! Modern capitalism was born. Due to this open-door policy, by the 1640s more than 18 different languages were spoken in the city, a multicultural community from the very start. To this day, there’s a hustle and bustle in NYC, an irrepressible striving for success lasting four centuries. That’s what makes New York different from Boston, Philadelphia, or any other town. And that’s why it’s a perfect place for coffee to be introduced.

The Dutch had trading posts spanning the globe, so the port of New Amsterdam received the consumable treasures of many continents, including coffee from Africa and Java, tea from China, and cocoa from Central and South America. Coffee was a beloved luxury item of New Amsterdam life, until the British took over in 1664 and tea became the obligatory hot beverage. But when the British began to tax tea (and most everything else) Americans decided it was their patriotic duty to drink coffee instead. The effects of that decision remain to this day.

Caffeinated yet? Let’s take a walk.

I love to imagine visiting a New York neighborhood of long ago, conjuring up the sights, sounds and smells of a forgotten streetscape. Would you like to join me in downtown Manhattan in the mid-1700s? You’ll certainly smell a very familiar aroma. That’s because we’re approaching the vanished neighborhood known as the Coffee District.

As we reach the East River waterfront at cobblestoned Front and Water Streets, we find ourselves in the chaotic epicenter of the green coffee trade. Tall masted ships loaded with sacks of raw coffee beans line the docks, while energetic jobbers known as coffee men rush to meet them, gather samples, collect bids, and settle on buyers. Competition was so fierce that it lead to the creation of the New York Coffee Exchange, a commodity market where coffee futures are bought and sold.

If we raise our gaze, we’ll see the massive dockside warehouses which store tons of green coffee beans until they are sold and shipped to markets far and wide, or make their way to the nearby fragrant roasting companies. Although residents may complain about the odor (as those who live near roasters still do today), we visitors like to inhale the intoxicating fragrance...and then yearn for a hot cup from the nearest coffee shop.    

We don’t have to look far. Coffee houses have long been important meeting sites for politicians and merchants (Lloyd’s of London started out as a coffee club.) New York’s first java joint was the King’s Arms which opened in 1696, and was the city’s only coffee house until the Exchange Coffee House was established in 1730 at the foot of Broad Street. The most significant of all was 1737’s Merchant’s Coffee House, on the corner of Wall and Water Streets, where the Sons of Liberty incubated the fight for American independence while consuming some brewed beverages, both hot and cold. When it burned down in 1804, the movers and shakers simply moved and shook down the block to the Tontine Coffee House (1793). Its shareholders paid dues for access to financial records, a set-up which inspired the New York Stock Exchange.

What is coffee anyway?

The story goes that in the 15th century a young Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi noticed that his flock got very frisky after eating some “berries,” which were actually the fruit of the Coffea plant. In the 16th century, the Turks roasted, ground and brewed the fruit’s seeds (coffee beans) to make a hot drink. Coffee became a big hit across Arabia, and spread around the world. There are two types of coffee: Arabica produces a smoother, richer drink, while the cheaper Robusta is harsher and more bitter. Today, coffee is the world’s most popular beverage; over two billion cups are drunk every day.

Coffee roasting is more of an art than a culinary task. A professional roaster uses not only sight and smell to detect the beans’ progress, but also listens for the pop of the “first crack,” and feels the rising steam to determine the level of evaporation. When the beans reach the exact stage that the roaster (or the roaster’s customer) specifies, they are immediately released, spilling out onto a cooling tray.  

At first, coffee was primarily roasted and served at home. “House-wives” would bring home raw beans from the market and roast them in a pan over a fire. The results were not optimal: smoking and scorching were a nightmare. This inspired the establishment of the first commercial roasters using large, clunky, dangerous machines. The roaster couldn’t see the beans to monitor their progress, and the coal-fired equipment was prone to bursting into flames. It wasn’t until 1884 when Jabez Burns, “the grandfather of modern coffee roasters,” patented his new machine with a turning helical flange which, like a clothes washer, kept the beans in motion for even heating. It also allowed inspection of samples during the process, insuring perfect results.

You probably have never heard of most roasting companies, but you’ve certainly tasted their coffees. The oldest is Gillie’s, which started in Greenwich Village in 1841, using horsepower to turn their roaster, and horsecarts to deliver their product to coffee shops, hotels and restaurants. They are still roasting coffee today in Brooklyn, where many roasters have relocated. In 1865, roaster John Arbuckle decided to sell his coffee beans in individual packages, “like peanuts.” Now households could buy professionally roasted beans at low cost. Trade roasters also produced Maxwell House, Savarin, Yuban, and dozens of other name brands, as well as store brands for Zabar’s, Fairway, and many other specialty shops.

Today, there are hundreds of small-scale coffee roasters all over town which roast, brew and serve their singular styles. But if you’d like to have another time-traveling experience, visit Porto Rico Importing Company on Bleecker Street. Opened in 1907, this place still has the feel and aroma of an old-style roasting shop, displaying dozens of differently sourced and roasted beans in burlap bags. When the owner’s wife began slipping orange peels and cinnamon sticks into some batches, she had invented flavored coffee. Another old-school winner is McNulty’s Tea and Coffee on Christopher Street.

So who’s Joe?

Your “cup of Joe” is named after Joe Martinson. You may have heard of his coffee. Joe was a resourceful immigrant from Latvia who started blending different kinds of roasted coffee beans in his mother’s kitchen and selling them from a pushcart on the Lower East Side. Joe’s formula was an immediate success, and the expression “a cup of Joe” was spoken throughout the hood. In 1908 he bought his first small factory and began marketing his premium blend to hotels and restaurants, always dressed in an immaculate tuxedo and driving a Rolls Royce. Joe blended and tested each batch of coffee, and personally inspected all of his customers’ brewing routines to make sure every cup was perfect. Instead of trucks, Martinson Coffee was delivered by liveried chauffeurs in a fleet of Rolls Royces emblazoned with the company’s logo. He was also among the first to hire airplanes to fly over the city trailing advertising banners. Joe died in 1949, just before his new roasting warehouse opened at 190 Franklin Street. Today it is the home of Robert de Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival and Tribeca Grill. You can still buy Martinson coffee at most supermarkets.

The birth of the modern coffee shop

By the mid-1800s, an amazing transformation had taken place in downtown New York. The demand for commercial space in the financial area pushed out residences. For the first time in history, a total business district evolved, where nobody lived. The workers relocated uptown and to other boroughs. Imagine having to travel a long distance to and from your job! A new word entered the NYC lexicon: commuter. Workers could no longer return home for their midday family meal, the most important of the day. Now they had to grab a quick bite whenever they could, close to work. By 1853, half of the local population was “eating out” at least once every single day. They flooded the new “Sixpenny Houses” which catered to people on the move. Thousands of men rushed from work at noon, downed their cheap eats speedily, and were back at their desks in 20 minutes.

Coffee, always a necessity, found a place in this new intense environment. In the 1840s and 50s coffee and cake joints sprung up everywhere, open 24 hours for early breakfast through late-night treat. These were the first modern coffee shops. The amusingly-named Butter-Cake Dick’s opened in the basement of the Tribune Building on Newspaper Row (Park Row.) Three “sinkers” (biscuits with a pat of butter in the middle) cost 3 cents, as did the coffee. “Pie Alley” on Frankfort Street swarmed with mobile coffee-and-pie vendors, pushing kerosene stoves full of 2-cent coffee and hawking Washington Pie (chocolate cake with custard filling). New Yorkers love pies, consuming 22 million of them in 1895 alone! (More about NYC’s cakes and pies in the Dessert Chapter.)

What about the ladies?

Until later in the 1800s, women were not allowed in restaurants unless escorted by a man. Some eateries insured this policy by installing a flight of stairs, which women would refuse to climb since it required lifting their skirts above their ankles. Single men enjoyed a “sporting culture” with access to steak houses, oyster cellars, saloons and brothels. Unaccompanied women had very few choices when it came to refreshment outside the home, mostly genteel ice cream parlors (see the Ice Cream Chapter) and frilly tea gardens. It took a courageous, creative and outspoken woman named Alice Foote MacDougall to change the way all New Yorkers took coffee and meals. To learn her fascinating story, select below: (there’s another link at the end of this chapter.)

Café Society

Sooner or later New Yorkers had to learn how to relax once in awhile and savor a cup of coffee in pleasant surroundings, like they did in Europe. All it took was for more Europeans to come over here and show us how it’s done.

Successive waves of immigrants brought their unique coffee styles to the Big Apple. In the 1830s, Germans introduced their café culture in Kleindeutschland, their neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Soon New Yorkers would become familiar with their kaffeeklatsch. Coffee and strudel became as American as apple pie. In the 1860s Italians came to the city, bringing with them their passion for espresso. Until Starbucks arrived a century later, the only places to sample this exotic beverage were Italian cafés such as Caffé Reggio (which introduced cappuccino with New York’s first espresso machine), Rocco’s Pasticceria, Caffé Dante, Caffé Roma and a few others. They’re still in business today. When the Greeks arrived in the 1890s, they became the masters of dining and eventually the face of American cuisine. Greek coffee shops abounded; by 1913 there were over two hundred of them on 7th Avenue alone! Their served their brew in the ubiquitous anthora cup, introduced in the mid-1960s by Holocaust survivor Leslie Buck of the Sherri Cup Company. It’s a blue-and-white homage to Greek hospitality: “We are happy to serve you.” The cup has become a pop culture icon and symbol of New York City.

The Village Scene

By the 1960s, Greenwich Village was buzzing with music cafés. Due to the scarcity of liquor licenses, bohemian types had to appreciate poets and folk trios while downing endless cups of coffee, often served “Viennese” with whipped cream. Some of the most famous of these coffee cellars were Gerde’s Folk City, The Bitter End, Café Au Go Go, The Five Spot, Café Wha?, the recently-resurrected Café Figaro, and The Gaslight Café, which was lovingly recreated for the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The Village was also home to many outlandish tea rooms, which we’ll get to very soon.

Coffee, coffee everywhere 

The places which refueled millions of caffeine-jonesing New Yorkers during the 20th century were the chain diners/lunchrooms, which were like expanded coffee shops. Spotlessly clean, with snappily dressed waitresses bearing steaming pots of coffee, these were the go-to places for business people, tourists, out-of-work actors, secretaries, lunching ladies and cabdrivers. Today, they are fountains of fond memories for many.

Childs: Imagine walking by a huge window behind which was an aproned woman flipping pancakes all day on a immense griddle. You’re at Childs, founded by William and Samuel Childs in 1889. Their insistence on cleanliness and hygiene (waitresses wore starched white nurses’ uniforms) drew mostly a female clientele. They were so successful that by 1928 they were operating 112 restaurants. After Sam died, William went vegetarian, removing all meat from the menu. Unfortunately New Yorkers weren’t ready for that. Childs went bankrupt in 1947, but you can still see their last standing building, on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Schrafft’s: This was another popular chain lunchroom, started by Frank Garrett Shattuck as a candy store in 1898. By adding coffee, a soda fountain, and then a full menu, the popular eatery grew to 21 locations by 1925. Not only did Schrafft’s serve mostly women, their restaurants were managed entirely by women. The last Schrafft’s was an eye-catching Art Deco building on Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, which later grew a gigantic rooftop iguana and became the Lone Star Café.

Horn & Hardart Automats: This is one of two chain eateries in which coffee was elevated to star status. Frank Hardart grew up grinding and brewing French Drip coffee, the kind served in his hometown of New Orleans. When he opened a Philadelphia diner with partner Joe Horn in 1888, Frank insisted on serving only the French-style coffee from the Big Easy; they called it their “gilt-edge brew.” Later, when they introduced their beloved Automats to New York, endless 5-cent cups of French Drip sprung from dolphin-shaped spouts. Horn & Hardart’s Automats were known for their eye-catching design (the Times Square location was fronted by an immense stained glass window.) They were also known for a century as a place with delicious coffee, and for their policy of allowing anyone to sit and nurse a cup for hours on end. The last Automat, on East 42nd Street, closed in 1991.

Chock Full O’Nuts: Then we have “that heavenly coffee.” Bushwick-raised William Black, after graduating Columbia, couldn’t find work. One day he discovered a tiny below-grade space under a stairway on Broadway and 43rd Street. He turned it into a roasted nut stand called Chock Full O’Nuts. He was so successful that in a few years he was running 18 nut shops. When the Depression hit, roasted nuts seemed like a luxury to most people, so William began roasting coffee beans instead, serving a memorable cup, along with an even more memorable sandwich of cream cheese on date nut bread, each costing a nickel. He was soon serving hundreds of thousands a day at 125 locations, and selling lots of his checker-cab labeled coffee in supermarkets. William had a mission to hire African Americans for all positions in his company, from his servers to his Vice President, Jackie Robinson (yes, that Jackie Robinson.) By the way, the original lyric to the catchy jingle was “better coffee a Rockefeller’s money can’t buy.” Then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller sued, hence the change to “millionaire’s money.”

Classic Coffee Shops

Throughout the 20th century and right up until today, Mom-and-Pop and independent coffee shops have abounded throughout the city. These smaller places with a counter, spinning stools, and a few tiny tables depend on to-go orders, with customers returning every morning for their coffee with doughnut or egg sandwich. Here, coffee is only available in two forms: “regular” (with cream and sugar) or black. That’s it; no soy milk or flavored foams.

Finally, there are gazillions of new coffee shops opening all the time, serving regular coffee as well as espresso drinks, and have hip names like Poetica, Coffee Rx, Think, Blank Street, Birch, Bluestone and Colombe. Lately, Australian-style roasts are the thing. Who knows what’s next?

Anyone for tea?

Okay, tea drinkers, this is for you. Have you heard of the New York Tea Party? In April of 1774, those Sons of Liberty, who were planning the American Revolution in a downtown coffee house, discovered a British ship containing 18 chests of over-taxed tea. They disguised themselves as Native Americans and dumped the cargo into the harbor. Sound familiar? Yes, they copied the Boston Tea Party which had occurred the previous year. It’s the only example of New York stealing something from Boston (except for Babe Ruth.)

Although second to java in sales, tea played an important role in Gotham’s growth. In the earliest days, the Dutch West India Company brought tea leaves from China, where they originated, to the city. In 1895, New York tea importers George F. Gilman and George H. Hartford opened a small retail business, called the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. It eventually became A&P. By 1930 it was the world’s largest retailer, with 16,000 stores earning $2.9 billion in Depression-era sales...all built on tea.

More importantly, by the late 1800s many tearooms were owned, operated and frequented by women. These attractive enclaves acted as an alternative to men’s saloons, and provided women with a self-supporting trade, or just a lovely place to take tea. Eventually, larger establishments had to change their ways if they wanted womens’ business; in 1907 the Waldorf Astoria posted a sign which read, “Ladies without escort will be served in the restaurants at any hour.” It spelled the end of male-dominated dining.

In the early 1900s a “tearoom cult” developed around Sheridan Square in the Village, frequented by bohemians, artists, writers and suffragettes. The more absurdly-themed the tearooms, the more they attracted curious New Yorkers and tourists. There was the The Crumperie, which served crumpled eggs. In The Pirates’ Den you’d be greeted by a pirate with eyepatch, cutlass, and shouldered parrot. Entrance to The Mad Hatter was via a rabbit hole. The Pepper Pot offered candy wrapped in poems, and The Village Barn held square dances. I wish these places were still around!

Today you can explore a universe of fine teas at Harney & Sons on Broome Street. Or visit the British-centric Tea & Sympathy on Greenwich Avenue, which not only offers teas, but also sells royalty-inspired cups, pots, cozies, and Corgy-adorned tea towels. For a more sophisticated experience, you can take high tea at one of the venues which celebrates this tradition. If there’s a young girl in your life who you’d like to introduce to the custom of tea-time, try the whimsical Alice’s Tea Cup which is decorated like a wonderland; there’s one on West 73rd and another on East 64th. But the queen of all tea services occurs every afternoon at the fashionable Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court. It’s just the thing to delight your little Eloise.