Abbie's Real Life Blog

This morning, I got a tour of the remodeled First Presbyterian Church, right up the block from my office.  My grandparents are members there, but the church was really home to me in my college years.  Quite literally.  And not for any real particularly religious reasons.  The Chez Coffeehouse was located in one underused wing of the church building, where it had been since the early 1960s.  In fact, that’s where my parents met when they were in college.  When I got to Mizzou, I made it a point to stop by there, and then I fell in love too… with the Chez itself.  For my first three years in college, it was my main hangout, where I volunteered as a worker on weekend nights, and where I actually lived for about two years or so (there was a residency area behind the coffeehouse, home to about four students at a time).

I have a lot of memories associated with that place, but that place is completely different now.  When I say remodeled, I mean it.  They gutted the whole building and now it’s all fresh drywall, stone tile, and new carpet.

There is now a coffee bar area where the Chez used to be, sharing the same windows and the stone fireplace, but they put in new carpeting over the old linoleum, tore down most of the weird art and pictures, and totally homogenized it.  It’s clean and fresh and new, completely unlike the dirty Chez that always smelled of coffee and was full of junk.

I am not that surprised or saddened by the departure.  The church scrubbed down the formerly gaily painted windows a few years back, and that’s when I had my moments of loss.  I hadn’t been inside in a long time, but that someone could just scrape off that 40-year-old paint was a real kick to my sense of history.

Clearly the church recognized that they were misusing a huge part of their building, and I’m glad that they had the cash and the interest to renovate it.  But I wish they could have left the Chez itself alone.

I put something up on Facebook (“how can something so clean be so wrong?”), and a lot of former Chez people made a comment, which was cool.  I am sorry that it won’t be around for us the way it was with some of the people who hung out there in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  It pretty much died a few years after I left.  (Not that that had anything to do with me.)

Oh well.