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by Peter Selgin
(Page 3)

Bringing Starbuck's to New York is bringing coals to Newcastle. We have cafés, thank you very much.

We know where Europe is too. It's right across that ocean, and not the one leading to Japan. We know what cappuccino is (it's a word that ought never be pronounced with a drawl). And we know what rain is. We don't need Seattlelites coming here and telling us the difference between wet and not wet.

So why the popularity of coffee bars? Because, sad but true, New York is rapidly filling up with people who'd rather be elsewhere (say Seattle). It's not that they don't like New York, they just don't get New York.

They don't get that some things in life should be left gritty, greasy, dingy and dim. Not everything needs to be brightly lit and familiar -- like a HoJo along the highway. They don't get that New York is the last great capital of anonymity and authenticity in the United States; a place where you can still find the genuine, the thing unadvertised, uncommercialized, unpackaged, unpimped.

They don't get that coffee ought to taste like coffee and not like hazelnuts.

Places like Starbuck's soothe such people by making them feel they never left home -- provided home is some place other than New York, provided home is Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Billings, Montana, or Corvallis, Oregon.

But if home is Greenwich Village, you feel invaded, even attacked, by such places. And well you should, for a virus has entered the city's bloodstream, a virus similar to that which brought the Gap and had everyone dressing alike from the Ansonia to St. Mark's Place.

You thought you were a citizen of the world, yet here you sit in the Carvel of Cafés, the Denny's of Decaf, the Banana Republic of Coffee. And who are these others - with their blank books and blank looks? Why, the same folk who dine at MacDonalds in Red Square, who show up at dude ranches in designer jeans.

You've heard of the Ugly Americans, behold the Ugly Consumers. Wherever they go, they take their favorite franchise with them.

They live in New York City now. They saw it advertised someplace.

You wanna be a real New Yorker? There's a Greek coffee shop right across the street. And if it's cappuccino you prefer, there are still plenty of real cafés scattered throughout the city.

That is, if Starbuck's hasn't bumped them all out of business yet.

Peter likes his black, with no almonds Photos by Peter C. Guagenti