When Carlos' Gosp'l Café closed, Santa Fe lost more than lunch.
Santa Fe boasts 310 days of sunshine every year.
Today is one of the forgotten 55. The sky is grey and forbidding. The increasingly skeletal trees lining the damp downtown streets hemorrhage their dying cargo rapidly in the chilly air. A slight drizzle plasters the fallen orange and yellow leaves to the sidewalk running the length of Lincoln Avenue into the heart of Santa Fe.
It's a great day for a funeral.
The viewing line is sporadic and informal. Groups of one, two and three filter into 117 Lincoln Plaza to pay their respects. They stride through the doorway and take measure of the somber scene. They trade a few quiet words with the assembled mourners inside before sighing back into this gloomy November afternoon.
Some-like the well-groomed man in the
sharp black suit-don't even know there has been a death until they stride across the doorstep. The man in black is dressed for the occasion, even if he's not quite sure what the occasion is.
"Hi, you guys moving or something?" he asks nobody in particular.
Carlos White looks up from the contents of a cardboard box to field the question.
"I guess you could call it that," White says. "But we don't have anywhere to go."
White is the proprietor of Carlos' Gosp'l Café. At least he was until yesterday. That's when-on Nov. 2 at 4 pm-he signed the lease termination agreement that effectively became the café's death warrant after 20 years in business. His hand was forced by poor business management and the cold-blooded economics that dictate which business lives and which dies in downtown Santa Fe.
White is not the first, nor is he
likely to be the last, proprietor swept away by the current of economic progress. Just across Lincoln Avenue, Rose and Adam Baca-the mother and son management of the Piccolo Café-are weighing their relocation options after being told
to make way for pending development.
City Hall sits less than 100 yards from both cafés. The day after White served his last Miles Standish on rye, the city launched the first step in its ambitious Downtown Vision master plan. The plan is years in the making and years away from completion but its primary objectives are to absorb the city's exponential growth and fortify the downtown infrastructure while maintaining the independent character of Santa Fe.
It's a progressive idea in theory. But while
urban designers, politicians, developers, business owners and the general public squabble over the details, many Santa Feans feel that small businesses like the Gosp'l Café-which reflect the very character the master plan purports to protect-are being lost in the torrent. Some fear there won't be anything organic left worth saving when the dust finally clears.
One thing is certain: There won't be any more homemade Gertrude Stein sandwiches or Say Amen desserts served at 117 Lincoln Plaza.
Despite its relatively clandestine location within the building
complex-located a block away from the Plaza-the Gosp'l Café had become a lunch hour institution for downtown denizens.
"It wasn't 150 tourists coming in for lunch, it was 120 people you knew and 30 tourists," 18-year-old Noah DeVore, who handled "foot-run" deliveries at the café, says. "You knew everybody. It was like, 'Good morning Liz, I know what you want: a decaf coffee with a Gertrude Stein.' There were a lot of people who called up for delivery and didn't even give an address because we knew who they were."
Fewer than 24 hours after the
Gosp'l hosted its requiem feast, the café's interior is only vaguely recognizable. The lights are dim. The incongruous tables and chairs have been stacked to the side of the black and white checkerboard floor. The glass display counter in front is empty. The cash register is dormant. But the most jarring thing isn't the open space, it's the silence. The gospel music that perpetually floated above the din of the café at lunch time has been stilled. The only sound is the shuffling of boxes, the clattering of dishes and the
skkkkkkkrccchhh
of packing tape.
"It feels like the end of an era," 21-year-old waitress/floor manager Nicole Kopelman says. "This place was a home for so many people. It's almost spooky seeing it so empty."
The "Carlos' Gosp'l Café" signs that once hung at the front entrance now sit alongside an unplugged neon "Open" sign on the floor at the base of a cardboard skyline comprised of boxes labeled things like "cooking stuff," "herbs and spices," "coffee and teas," "silverware," "house plates," and "weird stuff."
The chalk board above the front counter still reads "Welcome to Carlos' Gosp'l Café: Please Seat Yourself." The menu specials beside the salutation have also yet to be erased. The soup du jour is Garlic Cheese. The day's Say Amen desserts include flan, chocolate almond torte and slices of coconut cream and lemon meringue pie.
The 63-year-old White shuffles through the café packing boxes and chatting with the friends, family and soon-to-be former
employees working beside him. Every few minutes a new group of people arrive at the front door. Most are regular customers looking for a Gable and Lombard sandwich and a bowl of Hangover Stew only to have their hopes-and their stomachs-dashed at the door. Others come to offer White their support. People like 26-year-old Nikki Frishman, who hasn't worked at the café in six years but still regularly stops by to chat with her former employer.
"I kind of thought this place would be here forever," Frishman says. "At least as long as Carlos was around anyway. It's a shame for the area. It's a shame for downtown. It's our loss."
And, like many deaths, it seemed to happen
suddenly. The café had been reeling for the past few months. There had been head-butting with representatives from CB Richard Ellis, the management company for Lincoln Plaza and the Gosp'l's de facto landlord. Still, everyone, White included, fully expected the café would live to serve another Jack Dempsey.
They were wrong.
"We thought that we were going to pull through," Kopelman says. "It looked like the roughest patch was over. Then we got hit with this bomb."
The bottom didn't fall out on the Gosp'l Café. It rusted. Then it
fell
out.
The boiling point came a few months ago when the grease trap-a drain in the café's kitchen that traps grease and other waste water-literally rusted out. The subsequent leak damaged the drywall in the kitchen, creating a hefty repair bill that eventually became the straw that broke Carlos' back.
But the Gosp'l didn't arrive at Judgment Day without a little help from a false prophet. A few years ago, White entrusted the day-to-day operations of his café to a long-time employee he declines to identify by name. As one would imagine, faith is a fundamental tenet for the owner of the Gosp'l Café and White had plenty of faith
in his subordinate. At least until about three months ago.
"He went away on vacation and never came back," White says. "He worked for me for 12 years-since he was 17-and then he left without saying goodbye."
Not quite. The employee
did
leave a parting gift, which White soon discovered to be the café's crippled finances. Checks bounced. Bills went unpaid. Ledgers didn't add up. The economic apocalypse was nigh.
"I can't blame anyone but myself," White says. "He told me that he could handle it and I believed him. But I didn't supervise things the way I should have. It's my responsibility whether or not it's my fault."
White cancelled his cable, turned off his phone service and left his apartment to live with a friend while he nursed the café back to health. The business began to hum again. Debts were paid. Checks cleared. The books were balanced. Just as White was getting the café's head above water, the grease trap sprung a leak. White couldn't pay for the repairs. Enter the landlord.
CB Richard Ellis bills itself as the world's largest commercial real estate firm. It's a Fortune 1000 company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Alongside its affiliates, CBRE-headquartered in Los Angeles-operates more than 300 offices in 50 countries under the slogan "Local Real Estate, Worldwide."
Lincoln Plaza is owned by a company called
First Interstate Plaza Associates, but for all intents and purposes, CBRE was White's landlord. After the grease trap broke, FIPA-via CBRE-commissioned and paid for the repairs to the tune of $15,000. White paid the debt down to $11,000, but when he couldn't come up with the remainder immediately, his lease-good until 2010-went into default.
White hired a lawyer to help him negotiate a plan that would return the café's lease into good standing, but he says all his efforts-including an offer to pay CBRE the $11,000 debt in full on Oct. 31-were brushed aside.
"I offered them the full payment but they rejected it," White says. "They made it clear there were going to be no negotiations, full payment or not. They were going to kick me out one way or another."
White says CBRE also threatened to change the locks on the café and seize everything inside-including the kitchen sink-if White did not sign a lease termination by 4 pm, Nov. 2. White considered taking legal action to keep the café open but his lawyer strongly advised against it; with the lease in default, CBRE had the upper hand. The company ultimately tendered White an offer for a more gracious exit.
"They offered me an
incentive to pull out of the lease," White says. "They said they would forgive my debt and let me keep the inventory if I signed the lease termination. It was my best option. They were going to kick me out anyway, so instead they are-in effect-paying me $11,000 to leave."
Adele Garcia, the real-estate manager for CBRE-Santa Fe, declined to discuss the details of White's lease or the termination contract.
"All aspects of tenants' financial agreements are confidential," Garcia says. "All details of termination agreements are confidential. All of that is confidential."
But while CBRE certainly had cause to terminate the lease-particularly given the legacy of financial chaos left by White's former manager-Gosp'l employees like Kopelman feel the company exploited White's good nature through strong-arm tactics.
"They were very heartless the way they handled this," Kopelman says. "It really felt to me like they were trying to take advantage of Carlos and the fact that he wasn't well represented."
White, in his typical self-effacing manner,
humbly pleads guilty to a lack of legal and business savvy.
"I'm not a businessman," White says. "And I've taken a certain foolish pride in telling people that for 20 years. I'm just a country boy from Alabama, totally unsophisticated and poorly educated."
It's unlikely anyone could stay in business 20 years on Southern charm alone. In fact, White had a relatively cherry lease. It was good until 2010 and he paid nearly half the average square-footage rate normally charged by CB Richard Ellis in Lincoln Plaza and 150 Washington Ave. That deal-approximately $18 per square foot-was particularly sweet given that retail space on the Plaza slides well upwards of $100 per square foot.
Money aside, White thinks he might not have been the kind of business wanted in the area anymore. "One guy told me that I didn't fit the image that they wanted to project," White says. "He was somebody from [CB Richard Ellis] management who came up from Albuquerque just to tell me that. They wanted me out and now I'm gone."
Kopelman-among others-believes CBRE jumped at a chance to get out of the lease in order to catch the tide of soaring rent rates and expansive downtown development highlighted by the master plan vision.
"I think they just wanted us gone so that they can charge somebody else three times the rent," Kopelman says. "They're doing it for the money. I understand
why
they're doing it for the money but I don't think they understand-or care-that
what they're really doing is taking away from what Santa Fe is."
Adele Garcia says her office has already received a flurry of calls from prospective tenants interested in the café's space but hasn't selected the heir to Carlos. She insists that the rent will likely stay about the same, depending on the length the new tenant signs and if they accept the space "as is." Garcia says the relationship between CBRE and White was not contentious, though she declined to directly address charges that CBRE forced White out.
"I can't really respond to that without revealing [confidential] information," Garcia says. "But I can tell you our general plan is to keep putting in high-quality tenants that complement each other."
George and Don complement each other. Their powers combined,
they form Crandall Arambula, the Portland, Ore., consulting firm that won a lengthy bidding war to become Santa Fe's official Downtown Visionaries.
The day after the Gosp'l Café was shuttered, approximately 100 people gather inside the Scottish Rite Center to peer into the crystal ball Crandall Arambula has conjured for Santa Fe. Mayor Larry Delgado opens the proceedings with an impassioned speech.
"We're not Lansing, Michigan,"
Delgado says. "We're not Racine, Wisconsin. We're Santa Fe. We are one of a kind and we have to make sure that after this process is finished, Santa Fe is still one of a kind. I don't want to be Any Old Town, USA."
Messrs. Crandall and Arambula pounce on this point as they explain the Vision quest in a detailed Powerpoint presentation full of colorful graphics, pretty pictures and snappy slogans such as, "Great streets = great downtowns, Bad streets = bad downtowns."
They discuss development, parking, sidewalks, transit, tenants, housing, water, electricity, natural gas and waste. The presentation is exceedingly thorough-stopping just short of explaining plans to implement a standard city-wide procedure for clipping toenails-in scope, if not ambition.
But City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer still isn't sure it's a plan for the City Different.
"Part of the problem is that it's
their
vision," Heldmeyer says. "It's not Santa Fe's vision. It's not the public's vision. I don't know where their loyalties are at this point but what I do see is a continuing lack of understanding of what really constitutes Santa Fe."
That lack of understanding,
Heldmeyer says, has gone along with a lack of outreach. She says the city had promised an extensive publicity campaign prior to the public meeting "but what I've seen doesn't seem like the effort we were promised. We're not involving people on the south side at all." Further, the first Downtown Vision meeting was scheduled for the same night as the Planning Commission's vote on the Lensic renovation. "I got a lot of calls asking me if there was some sort of conspiracy," she says (there wasn't, just poor planning).
Simon Brackley, interim president of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, says he was impressed by the presentation. "I was also quite pleased by the number of people who were attended the meeting," although, he adds, "I only saw a handful of people under 35. I think young people need to become involved in this process."
If they stick around. The first stage won't be completed and the final master plan unveiled until May 2006; it's possible many small businesses will go under and many of the city's youth will bolt town long before the plan comes to actual fruition.
Noah DeVore is among them. The 18-year-old former delivery man for Carlos' Gosp'l Café says the closure of the Gosp'l was enough for him to lose faith in Santa Fe's lofty self-affirmations.
"That has pretty much clinched it for me,"
DeVore says. "The only thing someone my age can do for work
around here is bus tables. Why would I work a bogus job to pay ridiculously high rent when I could do that in the kind of place that actually has tiny sandwich shops and practice spaces for musicians?"
Good question. The answer of which explains why DeVore-purportedly one of the city's most talented young musicians-plans to relocate to California.
"They aren't giving us any reason to stay," DeVore says. "What other options do you have for me other than sitting in the Plaza smoking cigarettes? Mini-golf? Fuckin' a, Santa Fe. Get your shit together."
Unfortunately, Santa Fe has its shit together a little too well. Downtown retail space is worth its square footage in gold and often more viable for national chains than homegrown businesses.
David Kaseman, co-founder of the Santa Fe Alliance independent business organization, says national chains can survive longer downtown because they "have corporate bank accounts so they can pay the high rents and lose money for a long time before they even consider pulling out. Those rents stay high because they're willing to
pay them and that's part of the reason why most businesses have a hard time surviving downtown."
Those corporate bank accounts also are more appealing to the large land barons that have consolidated their hold on downtown real estate, in addition to allowing less than intrepid tourists an easy reprieve of familiarity.
"You don't need a tiny sandwich shop when you have a weird homogenized version of it on the Plaza," DeVore says. "We joke that it's not going to be long before they start putting vending machines with turquoise jewelry out in front of the Palace of the Governors."
We laugh, lest we cry. But Roy Wroth-a Santa Fe urban designer who worked for the city on the Railyard Project and was a member of a consulting team that lost out to Crandall Arambula-says those who lament the good old days when there were a grocery store and a pharmacy on the Plaza are far-sighted about the viability of such enterprises in a market driven by high-end retail.
"Things have changed in a much more complex way than people realize when they look back nostalgically on the way Santa Fe used to be," Wroth says. "It's OK if a cultural district has its own unique
metabolism that isn't based on a small-town economy. That said, there's no good reason why there couldn't be more organically grown businesses downtown. There are a lot of things you can put in those spaces that don't pander to nostalgia."
Without those homegrown roots, Kaseman believes the danger of downtown businesses tapping tourism dry increases. When one business dies, there are 10 more waiting to take its place at the roulette wheel. But, Kaseman says, it's businesses like the Gosp'l Café that have sustained Santa Fe through thick and thin.
"It's dangerous to live off tourist traffic alone," Kaseman says. "It's vital that a business attracts both tourists and locals. It's sad for me to see assembly line stores replacing the kind of businesses where you can see the owner in the back washing dishes. It's sad to see a place like the Gosp'l Café go under. Losing that is losing our soul."
The soul is on its way out the door.
Friends and employees of the Gosp'l shuttle boxes and framed paintings from the café, down the back alley-where, DeVore says, the homeless would occasionally gather for free soup-and into a large U-Haul truck parked on the other side of Lincoln Avenue. The café's
identity is slowly being carted away, one memory at a time.
Change, of course, is inevitable. That's evident enough looking at the building across the street from Lincoln Plaza. Soon enough, the La Esquina Building will be sold and turned over to developers. Next door, at Lincoln Place, a Morgan Stanley brokerage and Any Old Town, USA shops like Ann Taylor and J. Crew sit in the spot Sears once called home years ago. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
"Many thriving downtowns have a business association that sets the mix," Wroth says, "much like a mall…if I had to make a generalization of downtown businesses, I suspect individual landlords are not being as savvy as they could be about really studying the mix of retail and what that mix does for the cultural atmosphere of the
community."
As for those who lament the loss of cultural identity in Santa Fe, who yearn for the days when the Plaza had a grocery store and pharmacy instead of a Starbucks and a Subway, Brackley thinks, "It's dangerous to have a rose-colored outlook of the way things were in the past. You're not going to go downtown to buy a bag of nails anymore but you can go downtown, have a great dinner and be entertained. Progress is good. A dynamic, healthy community depends on change."
Tell that to Carlos White.
Actually, don't. He would probably agree with Brackley. White is remarkably upbeat and good-natured for someone whose world just came plummeting through the ceiling tiles.
"I don't play the gospel music for nothing," White laughs. "I'm not bitter or angry at CB Richard Ellis. That's who they are. It's not who I am."
White knows who he is, but he isn't sure
where he will be tomorrow. He has already
fielded
several proposals to spread his Gospel to another part of town, but for now he's putting his inventory into storage and contemplating where a 63-year-old goes to start over again. Ideally, he would like to stay in the restaurant business. But he says when the Gosp'l Café died, the name died with it.
"I'll still play gospel music, but if I open another place it's not going to be called the Gosp'l Café," White says, before adding thoughtfully, "Maybe I'll call it the Second Coming."
Gospel music is, in fact, part of the reason for White's sunny disposition on a universally rainy day. But when asked what song he listens to in dire straits, the normally affable White quickly becomes somber and pensive.
There is a song.
His
song. A
song written by renowned gospel composer Thomas Andrew Dorsey after his wife Nettie died during childbirth. White loved the song so much he subtly made it his trademark when he printed the song's musical notes on the Gosp'l Café menus.
"I snuck a song called 'Precious Lord' onto my menu," White says. "Nobody else knows that. Being a simple gospel song it repeats itself, but I chose one particular passage, which has kind of become my mantra."
White pauses. His eyes begin to water. He forces a smile and takes in a long draught of air. Then he begins to recite the passage from "Precious Lord." He speaks in soft fits and starts, pausing between lines to compose himself.
When my way grows drear
, White begins,
Precious Lord, linger near…When my life is almost gone…hear my cry, hear my call…hold my hand…lest I fall
.
White bursts out in a pained laugh, lest it be a cry. He excuses himself and shuffles to the kitchen to grab a tissue. When he returns-sunken eyes swollen and red-he has propped his frown back upside down. He apologizes and seems compelled to explain why his emotions don't normally get the best of him.
"I'm not a religious nut," White says. "I just have faith that everything will be okay. I believe-whether it's true or not-that everything is as it should be."
However that is.
