7 Things You Didn’t Know About Coffee’s History in New York City
(DNAINFO) Nicole Levy December 1, 2015 — It’s no understatement to say that coffee, for New Yorkers, is the gravitational force that keeps the city intact. Just try and imagine undertaking your morning commute without it.
This weekend, the inaugural New York Coffee Festival celebrates the city’s most vital beverage at the 69th Regiment Armory on the Upper East Side, offering coffee lovers, baristas, shop owners and buyers samples, tastings, talks, and workshops. The festival is the first by Allegra Events in the U.S., taking after their London and Amsterdam Coffee Festivals.
“The simple fact is that coffee has been the center of life in New York for a very long time, and New York has been the center of coffee’s life in the United States for a very long time,” said Donald Schoenholt, 70, a co-founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and president of one of the city’s oldest coffee roasters, Gillies Coffee Company.
Perhaps the world’s most ardent and knowledgeable champion of New York as the gravitational center of America’s coffee-sipping lifestyle, Schoenholt had a lot to teach us about the ways in which java has molded New York’s history and vice versa.