Coffee

and New York's Got the Best

It only makes sense that New York would give rise to a neighborhood named for coffee (priorities!). After all, there’s a Diamond District and a Garment District, and coffee matters way more than either of those things if you ask me. The city’s first coffee importers set up shop in lower Manhattan, paving the way for roasters and trading firms. By the late 18th century, the Coffee District was born. It was the gateway through which most of America’s coffee filtered into the country (see what I did there?).

By 1876, the U.S. was importing about a third of the world’s coffee, the bulk of which came through the Port of New York. Gillies Coffee, the country’s oldest coffee merchant, got its start in 1840 in the caffeinated quarter, on Washington Street (now they’re located in Brooklyn). But, like most great things in Manhattan, the Coffee District wasn’t long for this world. Meister writes of a twentieth century mass exodus, “Before the downtown rents spiked and moved the coffee men to the outer boroughs, Lower Manhattan was constantly enveloped in the aroma of roasting coffee.

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