Rescue Plan Gives Coffeehouse’s Fans Grounds for Hope

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard

wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts . . .

--Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

The Espresso Bar is a funky holdover from Old Town Pasadena’s pre-scrubbed days, a 1950s-style coffeehouse caught in a time warp and surrounded by carefully planned, upscale nostalgia.

Its scene is now dominated by teen-agers who go there to sip caffe latte, cappuccino, Jolt--a cola with double the caffeine and sugar--Brain Wash herbal sodas, Love Potion No. 69, Black Lemonade.

But it still draws students from the nearby Art Center College of Design, Pasadena City College and Caltech. And it attracts a few of what the staff calls “O.G.s” --the “original gangsters” who go back to the coffee bar’s earliest days.

It can only be entered from an alley off South Raymond Avenue, just south of Colorado Boulevard, where it settled in 1978 when Old Town was a slum with dirt-cheap rents making it attractive to artists.

Called simply the E Bar by regulars, it had been a place where counterculture parents brought their children, and some customers now only in their 20s have been hanging out there for more than a decade.

“It doesn’t have glass tables, and the furniture doesn’t match,” said Damon Fleischman, 25, whose parents first brought him to the coffeehouse when he was 9. “It doesn’t aspire to any particular bourgeois fantasy of what a coffeehouse should be.”

An antique, broken jukebox that serves only as decoration sits against one wall, a few paces from a battered upright piano that is kept in tune. A 6-by-6-foot painting of a scene from “Frankenstein” glowers darkly from one wall, but across the wooden floor a working fireplace glows on chilly nights.

The bar’s logo is a cracked, steaming coffee cup with wings, and the tips jar has a small sign reading: “Build Up Valuable Karma Points.”

Fleischman said the coffeehouse was the first place that let him play his acoustic guitar--that “let me get up and sing bad songs. There were a lot of artists around this whole area, and no one cared about it then. Suddenly it’s become an eyesore.”

The development of Old Town has left the E Bar at war with its gentrified neighbors over noise and the crowd it attracts--and with the city over entertainment permits and smoking regulations.

Smoking is no longer allowed inside, a restriction that moved one 16-year-old patron to complain that “coffee without cigarettes is like peanut butter without jelly.”

Nearby businesses are appalled by the “scruffy” teen-agers who hang around a wall leading into the E Bar’s alley--smoking, perhaps throwing up or showing more affection in public than Colorado Boulevard would like to see.

“This is Old Town,” said manager Erica Rawlings, 20, referring to the coffeehouse. “That’s New Town out there. People come here to avoid that scene out there. People who come here don’t have gold cards.”

The trouble is that not enough people have been coming.

The E Bar celebrated its 16th anniversary on Raymond on April 1. Last week, owner Gordon Beam told the staff he was closing.

But the young people who consider the E Bar their second home wouldn’t let him.

“If we closed, who knows what kind of hideous place could be here,” said employee Dave Melrose. “Maybe there would be a valet parking attendant standing there.”

Back in 1976 when the E Bar began, it wasn’t even a business.

Michael Thornberry picked up an espresso machine for the friends who hung out with him all night while he made cheesecakes in the rented kitchen of a closed motel on Arroyo Parkway.

He made his living as a baker and chef, but Thornberry’s real passions were playing the ponies, hanging around the Mt. Wilson and Mt. Palomar observatories and good conversation.

He collected an intriguing circle whose hearts were still trapped in the 1950s of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey.

“There were lots of places to crash around Colorado Boulevard back then,” said Beam. “It was sort of an arts scene--avant-garde filmmakers, painters, writers, jazz musicians.”

They didn’t call themselves beats, Beam said, but they subscribed to Kerouac’s belief in turning the big wheel--traveling the circuit from Portland to New York to Mexico City and back. Sometimes they made it to Europe or North Africa.

When Thornberry could no longer resist the call of the observatories, he went off to live in their shadows before moving on to Oregon.

He sold out to another regular, Margaret Schermerhorn, who moved the coffeehouse to South Raymond Avenue.

“Margaret was excited by the scene, and she had a lot of primitive business appetite,” said Beam. But she found that Thornberry had only made a down payment on the espresso machine, and no payments after that.

“She bought the business to learn she had nothing at all,” Beam said. “She gets an espresso machine about to be repossessed and the collection of people.”

When Schermerhorn--”a rural hippie at heart”--moved to Washington state about six years ago, Beam bought the coffee bar.

Beam, 56, had been living in the Pygmy Forest near Mendocino in the mid-1970s when his wife left and he “got burned on the rural scene.” He came back to Pasadena and studied accounting. Schermerhorn was his first client.

“I decided to get a job in the ‘70s,” he said. “I had grown up enough so I could sit through a class.”

By the time he bought the E Bar, the teen-agers had taken over, “and my neighbors just hated me. They hated Margaret. I just inherited the hate.”

*

The decision to close was simply a case of expenses being greater than revenues. Manager Rawlings said Beam has run up thousands of dollars in debt on his credit cards to keep the coffeehouse afloat.

Enter regulars Jim Gunther and Dave Wolf.

And Beam said he brought in Bad Trip Harry, a third-generation communist from Eureka whom Beam describes as “a master of the manifesto.”

“He was on the phone calling CNN,” said Beam. “I told him we’d have to shoot a helicopter to get on CNN.”

Gunther, Wolf and the coffeehouse’s employees quickly pulled together a benefit for Memorial Day. Even Thornberry came down from Oregon, telling Beam he had retired from cooking because he “couldn’t see anybody eating another omelet.”

Eleven bands played, they sold food and T-shirts, attracted more than 300 people and netted $3,000. It kept the landlord at bay for another month.

But Bad Trip Harry was fuming that the coffee bar didn’t close, Beam said. “He wanted to do an article for the L.A. Weekly on its death,” he said.

Now nine staff members are working for a share of the business, rather than a salary, and they’re planning another benefit for July 4. They’re also talking about advertising--something they’ve never done before--and optimism is growing that they may be able to keep the place going as a co-op.

“I was really not thinking about anyone else when I decided to close,” said Beam. “I got stuck in this capitalist, elitist, sole proprietor accounting jive. I had forgotten all about co-ops and communes. I’ve been down here too long.”

But not too long for the people who have worked for him, or who hang out at the E Bar.

“I’ve been coming here since ‘79,” said Alex Westfall, who works at a nearby shop. “Most people don’t realize that this place has character. To get rid of it is stupid. There’s nothing like it in Old Town Pasadena.”

Erin Sarkisian, 17, and Zha Zha Aghili, 16, sat sipping root beer and latte at an outdoor table, discussing an upcoming production of a theater group they belong to. They began coming to the coffeehouse when they were junior high students.

“If you’re cool with the staff, they’re cool with you,” said Zha Zha. “But I hate using the word cool. It’s so ‘80s.”

The irony of the E Bar being on the ropes when coffee bars are booming all over the Los Angeles area is not lost on the customers and staff.

“If it wanted to exploit itself, it could make a lot of money,” said Fleischman. “But it would lose the soul that makes it interesting.”