Daily eviction stirs students, locals to action

On the night of Fri., Aug. 28, a New Haven sheriff delivered the city housing court's Order of Execution, better known as an eviction notice, to Elm St.'s Daily Caffé. Until then, even the Daily's employees didn't know that the coffee shop had been on shaky terms with its landlord, Yale University, for more than a year.

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Daily Caffé customers refused to go quietly when Yale evicted their beloved hangout.

The order gave the Daily until 7 a.m. on Sun., Aug. 30, to move out of the property on which it hadn't paid full rent in 15 months. When the sheriff returned to enforce the order, he was greeted by about 70 loyal Daily customers chanting, waving signs, and exhorting passing cars to honk in support. "Welcome to Yale country!" they cried. "Your tuition pays to kick out legitimate businesses!"

"Yale's trying to kick people out who don't fit their status quo, their image," New Haven resident Mark Gunther, 16, commented. He added that,"This is a place for Yale students and people not from Yale to meet to hang out. [Yale is] trying to create a whole strip that's acceptable for rich businesses, students, and parents."

"People for 10 years have come through that door knowing they could get a good cup of coffee and see their friends," former Daily owner Steve Shapiro added. "[Yale was] anything but fair with us." Shapiro has owned the Daily with his wife, Madeline, for seven and a half years.

University Properties manager Jon Daigle downplays Shapiro's outrage and Daily customers' conspiracy theory. "People have tried to make this an issue other than nonpayment of rent, but that's it," he said. "[Shapiro] owed us about $34,000. He has portrayed himself as a victim, but no other landlord in the world would have given a tenant over a year to catch up on back rent."

"We really tried to give [Shapiro] an opportunity to fix his problems," University Properties director of operations Joe Fahey added. "When we met with him on June 1, we gave him a choice: try to take out a loan or come up with the money from some other source or shut down the business. He agreed to vacate the premises." Yale even offered to forgive Shapiro's massive debt when and if he left, hoping to achieve "a friendly parting of ways," according to Daigle.

To Shapiro, this seemingly generous offer was fishy. "They waited until June for the students to leave," he said, "Then they called me in and said, `If you go quietly, we'll let [the debt] go.' I did agree to leave at the end of July, but it didn't feel right. I knew how disappointed everyone would be" to come back and find the Daily gone.

So Shapiro decided to hang on and continue business as usual until fall. "It was a tough decision, but it felt right," he said.

Shapiro firmly believed the issue went far deeper and involved a great deal more than just the $34,000 debt. "Four years ago, we were the only coffee house on the block," he said. "Then Willoughby's and Au Bon Pain opened, both on Yale properties. We immediately started losing about 100 customers a day."

Shapiro maintains that these additions, plus the opening of Bruegger's Bagels and the Yale Bookstore over the past two years, were all part of Yale's calculated attempt to get rid of him. "The whole idea behind Yale's Broadway project was to bring in retailers that would bring more people to the Broadway area, but instead they only brought in more coffee places," he said, "None of these brought people into the area, they just took the people who were already there, the students who would have been on their way up the street, and drastically cut off the flow of customers to the Daily," he said.

"Nobody was against the Daily Caffé," Fahey retorts. "I think XandO was [the Daily's] main competition, and we didn't put that in. We bought the Au Bon Pain property with the tenant already in place. If Shapiro had the most successful coffee business, someone else would be going out of business."

Daigle added, "We think competition can be a good thing. Smaller competitors can be bigger and more successful competitors if they serve the market."

About a year and a half ago, Shapiro presented Yale a proposal for the Daily to take over the entire first floor of the property, adding a full kitchen and expanded seating in order to feature movies and live bands in a bistro setting. He claims Yale encouraged him in this idea. "I got Yale's approval for the plan. They even agreed to lend me some of the money for it," he said.

"Everyone was enthusiastic about the proposal, including me, but it was too late," Bruce Alexander, Yale vice president of New Haven affairs, said. "Someone told me a couple of months later that [Shapiro] hadn't been able to get the bank to finance the expansion."

Ideological bickering aside, students and townies alike will miss the Daily. "Yale may have had the right to evict them, but it's really sad," Audrey Li, BK '01, said. "The flavor of the other places around--well, it isn't home. They don't have the atmosphere I went to the Daily for."

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