A Coffee Shop Closes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/nyregion/31doodle.html

January 31, 2008
New Haven Journal
A Coffee Shop Closes, and There’ll Be Sad Songs Down at Mory’s
By THOMAS KAPLAN
NEW HAVEN

On Monday evening, Rick Beckwith unlocked the door of the Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop, the hole-in-the-wall diner his family has owned for 58 years in the heart of the Yale campus here.

Asked by a few passers-by what he was doing there hours after he had closed for the day, he told them, “I’m just cleaning up.”

Indeed, he was tidying up, but not for the next customers. He was cleaning up for the next tenant.

On Tuesday morning, instead of firing up the grill, Mr. Beckwith taped a sign to the door of what is commonly known as the Doodle. “Today, January 29th,” it said, “the Doodle is closing its door for good.”

Run by three generations of Beckwiths, the Yale institution succumbed to the financial pressures of operating a restaurant in an increasingly gentrified college town.

When Lewis Beckwith Sr., Mr. Beckwith’s grandfather, opened the coffee shop in 1950 with 10 stools, he charged 50 cents for a breakfast of two eggs, juice, toast and coffee. Three years later, two more stools were added and, aside from the prices, that was about all that changed until now.

Over time, the coffee shop became a favorite place for a fast burger or cholesterol-laden pigs-in-a-blanket. According to campus lore, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were regulars when they attended Yale, and the actor Henry Winkler ate there almost exclusively when he studied at the Yale School of Drama.

But until somewhat recently, there were only a handful of places to eat in this part of the city. Now, there are more than a dozen, and the Broadway area has morphed into a stylish shopping district, as Yale recruits new tenants to attract a more affluent crowd to the properties it owns.

“The best thing to do was, when the time was right, to just close the door,” Mr. Beckwith, 44, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “I really didn’t want to do it — it was a very, very difficult decision to make.”

So the latest Beckwith at the Doodle’s grill worked until 3 a.m. on Tuesday, “going down memory lane within my mind,” as he put it.

He was not the only one with fond memories of the place.

“All the Yale grads that have come and gone over the years — I don’t know what they’re going to do when they come back for their reunions and the Doodle is not here,” said Sam Kroop, 75, a New Haven resident who first ate at the Doodle soon after it opened. “It’s going to be kind of a shock for them.”

The news of the Doodle’s demise was the talk of this city of roughly 120,000 on Wednesday. Mr. Beckwith said he had been flooded with e-mail messages, hundreds of them, from loyal customers around the world. Many said they were stunned.

“There wasn’t any awareness that this was even a potential outcome,” said Harry Guinness, a senior at Yale. “Whether you’ve been there once or 100 times, it’s a very memorable place. For it to just suddenly disappear, it was just a big blow.”

Earlier this month, a friend of Mr. Beckwith, Philip C. McKee III, a 36-year-old artist and Yale graduate, did what he could to raise money for the Doodle by trying to persuade customers to endow a stool in return for a named plaque on the counter, but “they just couldn’t believe that the Doodle was actually in trouble,” he said.

Mr. McKee and others blamed the Doodle’s demise on “unreasonable” rent set by the landlord, Michael Iannuzzi Sr., who also owns a copy shop next door. Mr. Iannuzzi said on Wednesday that he did all he could to save the Doodle and had not raised the rent in recent years.

But the Doodle’s loyal patrons have no intention of losing their favorite burger joint without a fight.

Around the Yale campus, signs proclaimed, “Save the Doodle!” and outside the diner two flowers were propped against the entrance, as if marking the site of a tragic accident. On Facebook, the social networking Web site, hundreds of students, graduates and local residents expressed support for the shop and asked what could be done to save it, through fund-raising or other efforts.

Mr. Beckwith estimated that it would take at least a month to go through all the messages he had received before he could decide whether it might be feasible to reopen the Doodle in some form, in some location.

Several people have already offered to help out financially, he said.

“It’s one of the few dynastic successions that I had hoped would never end,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Oxford University and a Doodle regular when he was a student at Yale.

“Clearly the thing that belongs there now is the Yankee Doodle museum,” he added. “The exact store — just without the grill on.”