This is pretty much my favorite coffee place. Doma Café. Used to be on Perry Street and then moved down to Morton Street, still on Seventh Avenue. The floor-to-ceiling façade wraps around the corner and forms a 120° angle, giving it a feel of natural light on two sides. A blue awning hangs over two rows of tables out front with planters separating them from the rest of the sidewalk. Today it is raining, and the water comes off the awning in irregular but coordinated drips. I try to take a photo of this but can’t capture the moment. It is peaceful. Makes me sleepy. Or relaxed. Not sure which.
Doma is less of a coffee place and more of a creating place. When I would go to the Perry Street location, typically also on Friday mornings as is today, there was a square oak table that seated 6 to 8 people in the middle of the small room. The same group of writers was there every time: women and men discussing and arguing matters related to a screenplay (that one of them had written) or a play or a novel or a newspaper article or a politician. Sitting near them gave me a contact high.
There has yet to coagulate here a similar group of thinkers who assemble and debate and theorize and storm and form together. I’m told that it was around the common tables in Paris in the late 18th century where revolutionary ideas percolated along with the coffee. In America and even in this city, there is a slow morphine drip that numbs us, so that we don’t notice those sitting next to us. Or if we notice, we do not see. If we see, we do not engage. If we engage, we dare not offend. So we sit silently, and slowly we die.
The rain dripping from the awning. The morphine dripping into my arteries.
Time to wake up.
The Fourth New York 