Funny thing happened at breakfast......Lump of smoldering lava

So, this morning I ditched my work out. I even ditched my extreme heart healthy diet. I went to that new bakery on Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena I heard was so good. I got there at 6:30 a.m. There were people inside working, the lights were on and the door was unlocked. I couldn't find ANYWHERE the sign that listed their hours. So I looked around and I got a piece of toast with lemon curd and almonds on it and a coffee. Seven bucks. Kinda steep.



The toast was exquisite. The coffee not as good as the not very great coffee at Altadena's Coffee Gallery. The music was load, beatless, brittle and annoying. not exactly techno, not exactly New Age, sometimes vaguely Peruvian, but really awful. I was finished by 7:15. I decided to hang out and sketch, in spite of the annoying music that made me want to thrust my  Staedtler stainless steel drafting pencil through my temple just to make it stop.



I wanted to see who hung out here, since local discussions about Gentrification were taking place and this joint for all it's up-scaleness was supporting a Black candidate for mayor. Perhaps a sign of  integration of the local mostly Black community and the new to me undesirable gentrifiers. A Black postman came in on his way to work, quickly got a coffee and ran off to work. Soon a white woman and her daughter arrived. then a white guy and an Asian man. I kept count from 6:30- 8:30 a.m. as to race and gender.



White 15 people

Asian 4 People

Black 1 man

Latino 1 man



Twenty two customers twelve of whom were women, nine of those were White Women, three were Asian women.



There were ten male customers, one Latino, one Black, one Asian.



The staff was actually more diverse than the clientele, a unusual situation to say the least, for Pasadena. The staff consisted of one Latina, one Latino, one Asian woman, one white male and one Black male.



As the music droned on I thought, "For the investment and staffing levels there are very few customers" Then I began to notice that none of the people around me had that indefinable look, that Dena way of dressing and carrying themselves, and that all the cars that came into the lot were black and German except one gold Volvo station wagon and my 1938 Buick. Odd, I thought.



As I was observing this and thinking again how wretched the music was and also thinking, I wonder have they managed to find the only form of modern music completely devoid of any African roots, is that an accident?", The white guy and Asian guy sitting at the table next to me were talking about real estate investment. Specifically they were discussion buying a block and when to raise the rents and evict the existing long term tenants. The one asked if it wouldn't be better to keep the tenants in place and slowly raise the rents and the other responded "Those Black businesses are marginal at best. Better to evict them first thing and get them out of our building."



So there was I, sitting in the heart of Pasadena's traditional Black neighborhood, surrounded by White and Asian people who didn't seem to be from here, where people were listening to African roots-less brittle modern music (no easy task to find, or endure) and casually, calmly and with enough volume that those sitting around could hear clearly, the intentional destruction of an entire local business community. It was a shocking moment that had me much more awake than the coffee, but that turned my sweet bready breakfast to a lump of bitter smoldering lava churning inside my intestines.