The tiny Kingston hamlet of Wilbur, where the bottom of Wilbur Avenue hits Abeel Street, has a deep history as an industrial port on the Rondout Creek. Catskills bluestone, Rosendale cement and bricks from Hudson River claybanks were once loaded onto barges here, for transport to growing cities up and down the Hudson Valley.
Those days are long gone, and Wilbur is a sleepy place now, but for the clang of metal from the scrapyards and shipyards that line the Rondout shoreline. In the midst of the crossroads stands a century-old brick building once known as Creekside Deli, which most recently has gone through several changes of ownership as a pizzeria. By its last incarnation, as K & G Pizza, it had become a sad, rundown, unappealing sort of space, finally going out of business in the autumn of 2019.
New and surprising things are afoot at 587 Abeel Street, however: After a thorough renovation, the storefront has reopened as the Blackbird Infoshop & Café. And new owner Andrew McCarthy’s vision for the space is to create a neighborhood hub that functions on an anarchist, collectivist paradigm. “It looks and functions like a traditional business, but my goal is for it to be an anti-capitalist community space,” McCarthy explains. “If there’s one thing I want to say to the world, it’s to stop confusing commerce and capitalism. Capitalism is not the only model.”
That’s not to say that he isn’t out to make a living off the sales of gourmet coffee, tea and vegan bakery delights at Blackbird. McCarthy adheres to the “labor theory of value: that labor owns all that it creates,” and aspires to run a business based on “democratic and consensus-based control of the wealth generated. But I also have to make enough to sustain the space, to pay for the infrastructure. Being candid about the costs is part of my accountability to the community.”
What that means, when you walk into Blackbird, is that you’ll find an excellent array of hot beverages and vegan baked goods for sale, at prices higher than a greasy-spoon diner or deli but lower than a Starbucks – $3 for an espresso, for instance, or $4 with oatmilk (everything is non-dairy here). You’ll also find a sign over the counter announcing that “All prepared drinks and food are fully sliding-scale. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Seriously. We would rather serve you for free than not at all.” If you can normally afford Starbucks prices, you’re invited to pay a little more, at your own initiative, to help balance what’s given away for free.
What goes into making a guy with Brooklyn hipster tastes in coffee and an anarchist, “communist with a little C” ethos? McCarthy admits to having grown up a child of privilege, and is also quite candid about sharing his history of substance abuse to self-medicate for mental illness. “Depression is very much a part of my story,” he says. He dropped out of several boarding schools, in Connecticut, Montana and Massachusetts, followed by Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. “Then I moved to Brooklyn and got into specialty coffee,” he says.
Before his parents divorced, they bought a summer home in Stone Ridge, which his father continued to occupy for part of the year. After some years of working as a barista and “coffee tech,” McCarthy took a permaculture certification course and moved upstate with the idea of turning his father’s house into a “permaculture homestead.” He took a job at the restaurant Lekker in Stone Ridge (now Hash), became the in-house coffee maven and began holding pop-up coffee bars at the Black Barn in High Falls (now Ollie’s Pizza).
Eventually he decided to rent a space in Stone Ridge and operate a café on a collectivist model. Carthaugh Coffee opened on Route 209 in the spring of 2017 and had a two-year run. “The community was vibing with it,” he says; however, not owning the building made it difficult to sustain a business designed to maximize other values besides profit, or to make improvements to the physical space.
In the spring of 2019, with his mother willing to invest some of her retirement money into a startup, McCarthy found 587 Abeel Street available for sale. It had an attached apartment and an office space, in addition to the storefront. What was needed was a whole lot of sweat equity to do a gut renovation. While he describes himself as an “amateur” when it comes to construction work, the new owner moved into the accessory apartment in the summer of 2020, hired subcontractors and spent the pandemic years making the space clean and beautiful.
“Until November 2021, it sat pretty empty,” he recounts. “I had the asbestos remediation professionally done. There was also a lot of water damage. We had to reframe pretty much every wall, replace the electric and the plumbing, rebuild the floor.” Getting the rotted-out floors leveled to a point where the coffeeshop would be ADA-accessible was a particular challenge, he says. McCarthy credits the expertise and availability of Jim Fish of Loj Architecture, carpenter Steven Jayne and Dan Carey Plumbing with making the transformation possible.
If you have memories of that bedraggled pizzeria, you’ll likely find the space unrecognizable today. It’s full of sunshine and large potted houseplants, with freshly painted off-white walls and ceiling, dark-brown barnwood-style paneling covering the floors and coffee bar. New wood shelving in the front of the main room displays crafts, herbal remedies and upcycled gifts for sale on consignment from such makers as Sasasa, Firefly Resin, BlacSpiritual, Artemisia Negra, Umeshiso and Mycophilia. More shelf units in the rear house a Radical Lending Library and a “free store” that offers books and zines, COVID test kits and masks and an array of “harm reduction” supplies for people struggling with addictions, such as fentanyl test strips.
The main counter sports fancy imported coffeemaking equipment and piles of cookies, granola bars, hand pies, croissants and Danish pastries from Little Rye Bakehouse and Little Loaf Bakeshop. Most of the house coffees come from Farfetched Coffee Roasters in Rosendale, the decaf from Gimme! in Ithaca. Specials include such intriguing choices as espresso tonic, chai cider and maple latte, with prices topping out at five bucks (that is, unless you feel able to pay more, in the collectivist spirit).
To enjoy your coffee or tea in comfort, there’s also a sizable, sunny side room with small tables, chairs and couches and a kids’ corner with play furniture. On the day Hudson Valley One paid an exploratory visit, the walls were hung with vivid paintings by Deirdre Day, in anticipation of a fundraising event for the housing advocacy group For the Many. An outdoor room, currently with a single picnic table, will be expanded as the weather warms in 2023, according to McCarthy.
The storefront is available for use as a community event space, again on a sliding scale – even free for not-for-profits, in some cases. “I want to turn the garage into a stage venue. We could do music here. I wouldn’t say no to a punk/rock show,” he says. But until COVID is well in the rearview mirror, “I’m not itching to cram this place full of people, either.” Indeed, all visitors are expected to stay masked, except while eating or drinking.
Blackbird Infoshop & Café is open from 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays and from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, closed Wednesdays and Thursdays. Parking is available in the lot on the corner of Dunn and Abeel Streets, with an ADA van-accessible space located on the other side of the building on Abeel and some on-street parking spaces available in the surrounding neighborhood. To learn more, call (201) 621-3813, e-mail info@blackbirdinfoshop.com, visit https://blackbirdinfoshop.com or www.instagram.com/blackbirdinfoshop.
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