New York City Coffee

This colorful history explores New York’s coffee culture from the brew’s initial arrival in the 1600s to today’s artisanal connoisseurs. The coffee industry was made for New York: complex, diverse, fascinating and full of attitude. Since arriving in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, coffee held patriotic significance during wartime, fueled industrial revolution and transformed the city's foodways. The New York Coffee Exchange opened tumultuously in the Gilded Age. Alice Foote MacDougall founded