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Photos by Emery Akin.
Amber Tolbert, co-owner of East 59 Cafe, has found success post-pandemic with the cafe’s Lee Branch location.
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Photos by Emery Akin.
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Photos by Emery Akin.
In September 2020, just three months after Alabama ended its lockdown amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, with people working from home and many still isolating, a new coffee shop opened in Lee Branch.
In a year where human interactions were few and far between, the coffee shop, East 59 Cafe, offered a place to regain a lost sense of community.
That sense of community is what has driven co-owner Amber Tolbert, who started the cafe in East Lake in 2013 with her neighbors.
“It is a point of community gathering,” Tolbert said. “We have a lot of Bible study groups that meet here. We have a lot of book clubs, … things where people can meet and connect face-to-face, and I feel like that's sorely lacking [today].”
If you walk into East 59 Cafe today, you will see a group of women knitting, huddled around a long table and giggling over details such as the hem on a shirt. In the room next to them, parents gather for a PTA meeting, bustling in one by one as they grab a drink or snack. All the while, the smell of coffee, quiche and croissants fills the air.
To Tolbert, picking up an online order at a coffee shop and never interacting with a person during the process feels like it’s missing something.
“You can go through your whole day and not interact with a human being,” Tolbert said. “I think that is the thing that I'm most proud of our business, is that we have created a space where people can meet other people face-to-face. And we really need that.”
Photos by Emery Akin.
The cafe is functioning exactly how its founding families wanted it to: as a place where people from all paths of life intersect and create friendships.
In 2013, Tolbert, her husband, Stephen, and two other families in the neighborhood joined together in Birmingham’s East Lake neighborhood to open a space where friends in their neighborhood could enjoy good food and good company.
The Tolberts had been discussing how there was “no place to hang out” in East Lake, “no place to sit down.”
“As we were talking to some of our other neighbors there, … we decided we wanted to open up a coffee shop,” Amber Tolbert said. “Right when we were discussing it, … Rev Birmingham did a business incubator project — and they were doing that in October 2013 — where they had empty storefronts and they let people come and set up a pop-up shop.”
Tolbert said this seemed like the “perfect opportunity” to test their idea.
That week, she said 600 neighbors came in for free coffee and snacks.
“It was cool because we got to ask our neighbors what they wanted,” Tolbert said. “We were originally thinking, OK, we’re just going to be a coffee shop.’ But no, neighbors wanted a restaurant. They wanted salads; they wanted sandwiches; they wanted something that wasn’t fried.”
From that idea, East 59 Cafe was born, named after its location, which was originally just off of Interstate 59. In 2017, the cafe opened an additional location, which remains open to this day, in the Hoover Library.
But in 2019, the lease for the East Lake building was up, and Amber and her husband moved to the U.S. 280 area.
“We had a lot of building issues, so we decided to close [the East Lake] location,” Tolbert said. “And it was really hard to do, because we've very much loved that location and our neighbors a lot. So when we moved over this way, we kind of went back and forth on, ‘Do we want to open another place over here?’ And we found this location and we thought it would be perfect.”
The location has changed, but not Tolbert’s community values.
“It has always stayed true to our original vision, which was to have a place for people to meet and to gather, and that's really rare today,” Tolbert said. “We have such a huge customer base of regulars that just seeing those relationships developed over the years is really valuable beyond the dollar.”
East 59 Cafe, located at 701 Doug Baker Blvd., is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
Visit east59.net for more information.
