Easy Access vs. Vibe

I am volunteering twice a week at an elementary school in downtown San Francisco, and enjoying it immensely. Part of what I enjoy is the roughly ten minute walk from BART to the school, which takes me through a somewhat rough neighborhood which is slowly turning around. There are a couple of nail salons, and a couple of coffee shops, one of which I have been eyeballing since I first started volunteering in October. I haven’t been in yet, and today I realized why I stare wistfully at the door but don’t go in. It’s partly a Me thing, but partly a Them thing.

In terms of the Me thing? I sometimes have a problem going in to stores and particularly restaurants where I don’t know the lay of the land. I have largely overcome this, but I can recall times in my life where I would walk by a restaurant six or seven times before deciding I just… couldn’t. It’s the same thing that happened to me (way back in the Pleistocene era) when I had to make a long-distance call for the first time, one of those calls where you had to ask for operator assistance, and the phones had rotary dials, and the world was a sweeter and more innocent place. I have vivid memories of being nine or ten, trying to call my grandmother (or perhaps my mother who was visiting my grandmother) in far away Los Angeles, and putting it off and putting it off because I would have to ask the operator for assistance and I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t admit that I needed the help, because what if she said no? (It would have made no difference to me to have it explained that it was the operator’s job to help me, that she was waiting, hopeful that I would ask for her assistance, etc.) I was ashamed of needing help making a phone call that could not have been made in any other way at that time. So that’s the Me thing.

But the Them thing? This is a very hip establishment located on the bottom floor of what I think used to be (by the look and layout) a small manufacturing business. 20 foot ceilings, large open space, decorated in industrial chic (pipes and ducts are a feature, not a bug). It looks like it would be a nice place to sit and read or get some work done. There are seats by the window, a scattering of two or three tables, then a long, curved wooden counter with seating on both sides, and more curved counters to the rear… but no immediate visual information about where the hell to order your caramel macchiato with two shots. I look in the cafe window and imagine going in for a post-kindergarten-chaos latte, but I can’t imagine where I’d order it. The layout is too cool to be visually parsed from the street.

I wonder if this is deliberate. In my most self-deprecating moments, I imagine they want to discourage aging neurotics from messing with the vibe of the place. More realistically, I suspect that whoever designed the layout was thinking about that vibe, but not about human behavior. This happens with some designers: my first job, I worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in a huge, award-winning poured cement building that was always glacially cold, and where the famous glass ceiling over the vast studio area routinely leaked all over the desks when it rained. The building looked really cool, was much admired and, as I said, had won awards. But no amount of award-winning design can compensate for a little commonsense planning.*

I am going to go get a coffee there. I swear. The designer’s unwillingness to create a space that welcomes a passer-by will not defeat me, so long as I am able to defeat my own unwillingness to ask for help. If possible, I will refrain from standing in the doorway yelling “where the hell do I order my coffee?” Wish me luck.

_____
* I worked in the basement of the building, and one day heard streams of profanity issuing from down the hall. When I went to investigate I found an HVAC technician who explained, when I asked, that the Air Conditioning unit had died. It had been installed after the building foundation had been poured; then cement floors were poured on top of it. This might not have been a problem except that the unit was enormous, and the doorway that had been specified was not large enough to allow the old unit to be removed, or a new unit to be brought in.