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Healthy cities look timeless. Storefront awnings rotate with restaurants selling the taco du jour, while the faceless facades of office towers maintain their sheen as they continue to pocket the day’s burgeoning firms. Old neighborhoods and new neighborhoods meld in continuity.
The Rust Belt did not decay skylines so much as it dried up urban interlocutors. Through decades of slow emigration, neighborhoods became disconnected by metropolitan bald spots. So, when people kept telling me that I needed to check out Plate 21 in South Toledo’s Beverly neighborhood, it felt like they were telling me to travel to another city, even though it was only an eight minute drive away on the Anthony Wayne Trail.
In the Beverly neighborhood
Plate 21, located on Rugby Drive, off of Detroit Avenue and housed in a two-story former pharmacy, is a hidden neighborhood gem. The hardwood floors still have markings from the original soda fountain. The back wall is decorated with intricately designed, custom glass blocks fired in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion.
Inside, the place was filled with studying medical students, a women’s knitting club, a young family sharing kale edamame salads and fruit smoothies, and a teenage couple competing with each other to see who could stare more deeply into the other’s eyes. Behind the counter were baristas with clean, attractive faces that could blend in as supporting characters on a CW Network drama series. The organizer of this caffeinated conclave is city councilwoman, Sandy Spang.
Spang is quick and confident. She bounced between answering questions from her staff to asking questions of her customers with the brisk ease of a stage performer. “Have you ever ‘experienced’ one of our cappuccinos?” Spang asked me. I told her, “No,” and then frantically Googled on my phone for “How to talk about coffee and not sound like an idiot.”
Spang ordered us each a cappuccino, a macchiato and a “pour-over”—a cup-by-cup method of making drip coffee where hot water is poured directly onto the coffee grounds by hand. The cappuccino came in a palm-sized mug with a tree designed into the steam-foamed top. The foam coated my tongue with freshly roasted espresso and burnt sugars. The texture was thick and meaty; drinking it gave me the same satisfaction as one gets when tearing into a steak with a fork and knife. The macchiato came in a much smaller mug because it had a more equal ratio of milk to espresso. Its coffee flavors were more immediate, and it burst with tastes of cocoa beans and sweet cream.
A pour-over favorite
But my favorite was the simple pour-over. I tried a blend of Kenyan and Ethiopian beans, both roasted in Grand Rapids, Michigan just days before. It was vibrant, with muted berry fruits and steady, mild bitterness. Every sip was fresh and colorful. It tasted like Juan Valdez produced a party drink to be sold outside a reggaeton concert at a Colombian night club.
The centerpiece of the shop is a hand-drawn map of “Plate 21” from the 1940’s, which shows the connected neighborhoods for that plate of the city. “I live in Plate 21!” Spang told me. She grew up there too, as do the couples who come there to shoot engagement photos, or pick up their “Plate 21” onesies that the shop gives out for free to newborns. “It’s about relationships,” said Spang as she described her business model.
As I drove along Beverly Drive on my way home, it struck me how closely the neighborhood still modeled the Plate 21 map from over a half-century ago. “At our heart, we are a neighborhood place,” said Spang. Her neighborhood has become a destination. Plate 21 is not a renovation of an aging neighborhood, but instead, is a reinvestment into a city that has begun to reconnect itself.
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M-F 6am-7:30pm, Sat 7:30am-3pm. 3664 Rugby Dr. 419-385-2121. plate21.com
Dorian Slaybod is 27, a local attorney, and happily living in Toledo.
