I'd been excited about Alt.Coffee even before I moved to NYC. In the summer of '99, as I drove my U-Haul down from college, I was sure Alt.Coffee was where I'd find the geek communist cyberpunk literary digital anarchist art community to which I so desperately wanted to belong. I just knew I'd be spending all my time there arguing about Pointcast and Netscape and TheGlobe.com and Tripod and Flooz and whether Lycos was better than Hotbot.
Reality at Alt.Coffee didn't live up to my expectations: bad coffee, surly service, and no intellectual discourse beyond asking a fellow patron to move his legs while I plugged in my laptop. There was one aspect of Alt.Coffee, however, that made me feel like I was on the periphery of some sort of digital culture, even if I wasn't actually part of it: the bathroom.
[3]
[4]
Where CBGBs bathroom were horrifying, forcing you to weigh your need to go against the intense awkwardness of pooping on what was essentially a stage, Alt.Coffee's bathrooms were fascinating. The dusty old computers, the turn-of-the-century bathtub, and the political graffiti made using the facilities an experience in sensory overload. You wanted to linger. You wanted to look. You wanted to paste up PoopReport stickers, even though they were inexplicably taken down by the next time you arrived, as if filth and chaos were okay for the bohemians but bathroom humor was not.
Alt.Coffee will be closing soon for renovations, and will reopen as Hopscotch, "a café tailored to the needs of children and families."
What more can be said?
[5]