The Courage to Colonize
While the attempt may salve your guilty conscience, you cannot peacefully “coexist” with what you have destroyed; you can only demean those you have displaced. Nevertheless the new colonizers persist.
A boxy behemoth containing 24 charmless condos priced between $400 and $950k stands within eyeshot of my apartment, the handiwork of a developer who “prides themselves in responsible real estate.” It is built atop the rubble of a Cuban-owned Caribbean restaurant that occupied the land on the corner of Virgil and Melrose for two decades prior to the developer’s purchase of it for $2.5 million. The condo building is called the “Cha Cha Cha,” as was the restaurant it demolished in order to be built. The restaurant’s neon sign, saved from demolition, now hangs in the building’s lobby; it is impossible not to view it as a trophy. The developers didn’t consult the restaurant’s former owners when they took it upon themselves to name their condos after them, assuming instead that they’d be “flattered” by the tribute. They were not.
On the corner of Virgil and Clinton, a woman sits in the sun behind a folding table selling menudo on a bright, cloudless Sunday afternoon. There are no takers. A few blocks down Virgil, a line of people in athleisure stand in a bread line. Whereas bread lines of the past were populated by poors waiting for a scrap of kindness, the bread lines of today are populated by the opposite; upwardly mobile types who willingly pay for the privilege to wait.
This bread is not free. Nor is it your standard bread. It is, instead, an immensely Instagrammable Montreal-style bagel, small, thin and burned on purpose, cooked by a woman who has no connection to Montreal, a city she has never visited. She learned about their existence on a blog. Four years ago, at the tender age of 24, she found herself laid off from her marketing job and with a desire to “make things. I wanted to use my hands,” she said, “and I wanted to do something honest! Something real! Flash forward a couple of months — I started making bread and whoa! Flour and dough and starters…a whole new world opened up to me. Randomly bread turned into bagels! After that everything just started clicking together…I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was — I wasn’t going to let the fear hold me back from this adventure. I was going to find my courage!”
She called her venture “Courage Bagels.” For four years she has been selling her wares outside farmers markets in Echo Park and Silver Lake from the back of a shiny red beach cruiser. The idea to peddle them via bike came before had she even owned one. She built the brand, you see, before she had even built the business. A cursory look at her Facebook profile reveals she built herself, too, leaving the trappings of her midwestern upbringing behind and generating a new personality based upon what was trending once she reached California’s golden shore. A recent tagged Instagram photo shows her modeling $300 pajamas in her white, plant filled bungalow. Go west, young hot chick, and conquer.
She is from Michigan; her fiancé, who cooks the bagels with her, is from New York. In an article from 2011, he referred to himself as an "environmental entrepreneur"; as of today, he is the proud author of a book entitled “Lucid Dreaming for Cats,” which can be pre-ordered for $30. “At the start of 2019,” she recently wrote on Instagram, “we told each other we were going to open a bagel shop in 2019 — you can call it a resolution. Even though we had NO idea how or when or how?!!?” The fact that they knew nothing, however, didn’t dissuade these brave whites from pursuing their dream. “Soon after that,” she wrote, “the how’s and the when’s didn’t feel so out of reach — things started to fall into place.” Courage Bagel signed their storefront lease in June 2019.
And now, over a year later, their plucky resolution has finally come to pass, in the husk of a former Guatemalan-owned bakery that occupied the space for two decades before an investment firm purchased the property and raised its rent by over 200%. The bakery was called Super Pan, and it was the last panadería on Virgil Avenue, catering to street vendors and storefront churches; the proprietor, Elvia Consuelo Perez, had a passion for cooking, having learned to do so as a child. In the window of Courage Bagels now hangs a sign that reads “Super Pan Pan Dulce: $0.50.” (“We know they are loved and missed,” says a caption on Courage’s Instagram, “so we are so excited to tell you we teamed up with Dona & Super Pan to bring her pan dulce to the block once again. :)” ) The sign next to it advertises Courage’s most popular item, Wild Alaskan Salmon Roe Bagels, at a price of $18. The menu is printed in both English and sloppily translated broken Spanish. The demographic of the line outside Courage Bagel, however, is decidedly non-Latino. No one Instagrams the pan dulce. Everyone Instagrams the salmon roe bagels.
Super Pan was ejected from the space in December 2018 after being given 60 days to vacate by the building’s new owners. Upon leaving, Elvia lamented, “Many customers that I had are no longer here because [they] were evicted and the rent is so expensive. It hurts me a lot because many friends in this area have left. The Americans have come and they do not want Latinos here, they want to disappear all the small businesses that are on this street. I’m leaving with great sadness. I resign myself.”
Before it even opened, the Cha Cha Cha’s website prominently featured Courage Bagel as a staple of the neighborhood, stating it would soon be “kitty corner to Jessica Koslow’s Sqirl in the beloved former Virgil Village panadería, Super Pan.” Now that the business has opened up shop, patrons can purchase copies of “Lucid Dreaming for Cats” alongside Courage Bagel shirts. Both are $30.
Because it’s not so much a bagel but a brand. And every brand is cultivated at a cost.