This article is a sham. There are three players involved in this debacle, and each one is misrepresented in this report.

                First and foremost, there’s the 19th Ward Community Association, a 45-year-old neighborhood organization that was founded to bring a halt to blockbusting, an effort of real estate agents in
the 1960s to control racial and ethnic profiling for their own profit. The
result of that effort is a diverse neighborhood that boasts the largest per
capita concentration of African-American PhDs in the country. For the last 20
years, neighbors have been devoting their time, effort, and money to
resurrecting the former neighborhood anchor pharmacy building at Brooks and
Genesee. My small part in this was to dedicate my United Way dollars to
acquiring, restoring, and developing this building from neighborhood eyesore to
icon. When it became clear that we couldn’t do this on our own, we reluctantly—then
gladly—handed over this piece of our heritage to Boulder Coffee on the promise
that the coffee shop we’d envisioned there as Urban Brew would be there for at
least a decade as Boulder. In the end, the neighborhood feels betrayed by folks
and forces that we thought we could trust. The coffee shop across the street in
the strip-mall office building may keep the UR student traffic, but I doubt
that 19th Ward folks will find it any more inviting than the Starbucks on Mt.
Hope.

                Second, although some folks see Chabad House as the enemy in this sad misadventure, our Jewish friends are really the victims—yet again—in this chess game of the power brokers in our community.
They have no idea of the opportunity they lost by failing to move into our
neighborhood as welcome newcomers instead of as the intruders they’re now seen
as. Despite his dour image in the City Newspaper article, Rabbi Asher Yaras,
seems like the ideal neighbor—charming, outgoing, friendly. Unfortunately, I
think it will take a Davidic effort to overcome the negative image he’s created
for his new center. I’ve been in the Chabad House in Brighton twice and never
felt, as a goy, like an outsider. But there’s a world of difference between
being welcomed to religious services not of one’s own faith and meeting a few
friends for lunch at a place where you belong.

                Third, there’s Lyjha Wilton, owner of Boulder. Lyjha is a nice young family man, trying to make his way in the business world in a bum economy. He did a great job in renovating the old
Carr Pharmacy into a warm and friendly place to which folks in the neighborhood
felt proud to invite their friends. Despite the recession that started virtually
on the day it opened, it was always busy with a good mix of UR students and
employees and 19th Warders. True, it often seemed understaffed and much noisier
than its South Wedge counterpart, but these are failings that could have been
dealt with through cooperation rather than abandonment.

                In the long run, it’s hard to tell what will happen at the corner of Brooks and Genesee, but I do think that the hopes and dreams of the 19th Ward will have to find a new focus—maybe Bull’s
Head, maybe Thurston Road, maybe Chili Avenue. It’s been a lovely two years, but
Brooks Landing will never be the same when this transfer happens.