‘Who Died?’ ‘It’s the Starbucks.’

When Alisa learned the Starbucks across the street from her apartment was closing, her first thought was How am I going to tell her? The Starbucks was so close and so busy that it never seemed dangerous to let her 11-year-old, Aerin, hang out there. Plus, it was nice — spacious and bright, recently renovated, and just a little fancier than the other locations a few minutes away. Aerin would go on weekends and come home with stories about friends she saw there and a barista named Brittany. Once, she even brought home one of Brittany’s signed cups. Alisa looked stricken when she tried to break the news. “Who died?” Aerin asked. “It’s not a person,” Alisa told her. “It’s the Starbucks.”

A good-bye card that Aerin wrote for her favorite barista.
Photo: Provided by Aerin and Alisa.

This month, Starbucks closed just over 2 percent of locations across the country, but 8.5 percent of those stores were in New York. According to one count, more than half were in the five boroughs. Landlords fumed. (“No warning, no heads-up.”) The city sent a strongly worded letter suggesting a failure to comply with labor laws. Unionized workers claimed retaliation.

Other New Yorkers just … flipped out. “The only thing that would make me leave NYC,” one Starbucks loyalist wrote when closings started last week. “Don’t ever take my Venti soy quad iced latte from me.” The chain that had pummeled mom-and-pop cafés, ruined a generation of palates with its burned dark roast, and as of late been in various standoffs with its unionized workers has also somehow gained the status of a beloved neighborhood haunt. In the 31 years since the first New York store opened on West 87th and Broadway, Starbucks had, at least to some, become a character in the city, as ubiquitous as the hot-dog cart and more dependable than the corner newsstand, at least if you were looking for an edition of the New York Times (as my mother, a puzzle addict, discovered).

Starbucks had staying power, even in high-turnover neighborhoods. As we wrote last year, the Astor Place Starbucks was the second-oldest store on the street when it went dark. And after plans were announced to close a Starbucks on the Upper West Side in 2019, a group of die-hard customers launched a petition to “Keep our very special Starbucks.” (It didn’t sway the outcome). In Greenpoint, the closure of a location in a former theater prompted demands to bring back a theater but also an outpouring of affection, including from a local pizza spot’s owner, who reminisced about doing all his job interviews at the Starbucks, and from a former employee who said they met their wife there.

Like other major 1990s chains that seemed like soulless outsiders in the Giuliani years — Barnes & Noble or Bed Bath & Beyond — Starbucks had become part of the scenery. The death of a location in Flushing, across from the library on Main Street, led the photographer Cynthia Chung to film her last walkthrough. “I don’t really know why I’m making this video,” she says during the walk. “I think I just wanted to keep it as a memory.”

Aerin, the 11-year-old who mourned her Upper East Side Starbucks, told me she plans to start going to the location near her school, five minutes further from home. But that doesn’t solve the question of how to find Brittany. The barista was the first person she befriended on her own, outside of the world of camps and schools and family friends, she says. Aerin wrote a card thanking her. But the location had already shuttered by the time she tried to deliver it. A friend’s doorman used to work at the store and has been asking other former employees for her contact information. For now, Aerin has a souvenir of their time together: “I actually saved one of those cups,” she said.

Any leads on a Brittany who worked at Starbucks on East 80th? Write to tips@curbed.com.