The oldest restaurant in Phoenix in 1900, Coffee Al's


According to this ad in the Phoenix newspaper in 1900, Coffee Al's was the oldest restaurant in the city. At that point it had been for nine years, which meant that it started in 1891, twenty-one years after the city of Phoenix was created. And my only question to that is "why did it take so long?"

I have several cups of coffee every morning. When I wake up, before I feed the dogs, I make a cup. Then I go out for my morning coffee (usually a senior coffee at McDonald's). And I will often make myself another cup of coffee when I get back home, an hour or so later. I like coffee.

And as a corporate guy back when I worked for Valley Bank/Bank One I would get up from my desk several times a day to go get coffee in the break room. I've always given myself a 3pm curfew on caffeine, but up to that time it doesn't bother my nighttime sleep patterns. And besides, it has helped me to socialize with people, which has been good for my career, and my life.

But today I'm thinking about how people drank coffee in old-time Phoenix. No, I don't mean whether they used cream or sugar, I know they did. No artificial sweetener in those days! I mean how much people drank coffee with their meals. If I ordered a sandwich, or a salad, at a restaurant for lunch along with a cup of coffee (which I've been known to do!) I would get some strange looks. I doubt whether the average sandwich shop has coffee, and if it does it's probably not very fresh. The demand just isn't that high! Can you imagine asking for coffee at Subway? I wonder if they have coffee? Maybe I don't want to know.

And how about some ice cream? Coffee Al's was more than just a coffee shop, it seemed to have it all, and was very up-to-date. I'm sure that they used steam for the coffee, and the cold storage would have been wonderful, because who wants warm ice cream?

Somewhere along the line, drinking coffee with meals (other than breakfast) went out of style. I distinctly remember watching an Abbott and Costello clip where they had coffee with their hamburgers. I would do that, but would you?

Hmmm... for some strange reason a cup of Joe sounds good right now!
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please consider subscribing to History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

  1. Jeff MoriartyJuly 19, 2020 at 11:02 AM

    Any idea where it was located in Phoenix? I guess it was so well known that ad didn't need an address.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brad HallJuly 19, 2020 at 12:37 PM

      Hi Jeff - yes, it was very well-known, and Phoenix was a very small town in 1900! It was on Washington just west of Central.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more