For a brief period about ten years ago, I was a regular at the 11th Street Expresso House (intentionally misspelled, fyi). It was a very brief period because I was in college in South Carolina at the time, and I was just home for Christmas break. But almost every day during that break, I could be found at 11th Street for most of the morning hours.

Coffee shop life is a late hours thing, but I was never interested in staying up late drinking coffee. I was there to sit, read, and soak up the atmosphere, which was pretty nice, especially since the place was pretty empty before noon. That break I read almost all of Anna Kerenina while sipping black coffee at the Expresso House.

I’ll always remember with fondness those days of being able to go pour my own coffee and leave my change on the counter, before settling back into my seat.

11th Street was an odd duck. Its owners were – as I understood it at the time – very conservative hippy-ish Christians, but you were almost never there when the crowd wasn’t the opposite. But I did have someone try to “save” me there once. She was the ex girlfriend of the Jimmy Hendrix’s drummer, I think. Yeah.

Anyway, that time at 11th Street was partially responsible my longstanding love of coffee shops, and for years it was my dream to run one (as I wrote about before). I simply love the idea of a laid back place where you could drink good drinks and hang out and talk.

Of course I haven’t been back to 11th Street in years. You could say we grew apart. But every time I drive by the place I am filled with nostalgia, and it was with incredible sadness that I read on KnoxViews (where I stole the photo, because I’m lazy) that my beloved old coffee shop is now going back to its roots and will once again be a (expensive and small) house for some lucky family. I wish them well.