When Matt Neal, Jessica Fletcher and her husband, Jim, bought the property at 937 Central Ave., little did they know they were buying a haunted house.
They didn’t know they were buying the remains of the Phoenix, born the Realm, a coffee shop whose brief life provided a place for what had been a nascent community of displaced youths and adults.
The Realm started with a bang in late 2001, with performances by a series of live local bands. Unfortunately, the bang was too loud, and more than a dozen complaints from local business owners put an end to the music series.
It’s not the bands that most people remember.
The word that surfaces often in descriptions of the defunct coffee shop is “dark.” “It reminded me of a makeout room,” said John Navarro, a regular. Former patrons grumble about the Realm experience: groping through a dark maze of beat-up, cushionless furniture to the cash register, ordering food and finding there was none in stock, settling for a bad smoothie and being unable to rest the drink on a counter decorated with multicolored, protruding, polyurethane stones. All to the drone of a Massive Attack CD on repeat.
But they kept going back because, in the words of Stazja McFayden, who hosted a popular monthly slam poetry night there, “It wasn’t like you had to fit in to belong there.”
People describe the crowd at the Realm as a motley collection of young Gothic kids, bespectacled adults and prepsters with facial piercings. “It was wild, is what it was,” said Darla Kleinik, a bartender next door at Steve’s Tavern on the Ave. “It was the kids with the spiked hair and the different-colored hair.”
This series focuses on three areas of downtown: BayWalk, what many consider the center of a revitalized St. Petersburg; Williams Park, BayWalk’s neighbor, polar opposite and the center of the city’s growing homeless population; and a coffee shop in the 900 block of Central Avenue, a place that hasn’t mirrored the economic growth closer to Tampa Bay.
The three areas offer potential visions of downtown’s future. It might be poised now for an infusion of wealth, an upheaval among lower-income residents and local business owners, or a continued tension between old and new.
McFayden said she once took a survey of everyone in the place, asking them if they felt they fit in. All of them, she said, considered themselves alienated, outside the mainstream.
Her monthly slam poetry nights, and the weekly open mike nights hosted by Gene Riddell, gave voice to this community of loners. The string of poets who took to the microphone performed before an audience game enough to listen, so that even those who’d never read their poetry in public felt emboldened to share their work. That spark of unmuzzled creativity surprised many more experienced poets. Riddell said he was awed to see first-time readers bring life to their compositions in performance. “To read the piece,” he said, “that verb doesn’t even do it justice.”
Perhaps the most infamous member of the crowd was its young, fiery owner, Dawn Storm. Everyone has an opinion on Storm, and those vary widely. Patron Colin Chapin calls her an “extremely nice young woman.” Kleinik says, “When she wanted something, she was nice. If she didn’t want it, she was nasty.” Navarro describes her as “kinda a yoga girl.” He adds that an outline of her body was stenciled onto the bar counter, frozen in some macabre, balletic contortion.
But no one knows where to find her since the bar closed in March, after briefly changing its name to the Phoenix. Rumors abound that she’s living in Tampa, possibly dabbling in music. Former bar patrons report sightings at other St. Petersburg hangouts. Friends and business associates say they have no way of contacting her.
And anecdotal reports indicate that many of the Realm’s regulars have followed Storm into the void. The coalescing community that had begun to find its home in the little place disintegrated with the venue’s loss. Brett Ross used to perform live music with his friend at the Realm, and now hangs out at the Globe Coffee Lounge. According to Ross, some of his friends from the Realm followed him to the Globe, and some “just kind of disappeared.”
Now, Matt Neal, his sister and his brother-in-law intend to summon a community back to where the Realm once was.
The trio sits on a patio behind a chain-link fence downtown, painting the ground to look like cobblestones, listening to the mellow electronic groove of Jazzanova. They debate grand visions of the café they hope to open sometime before September.
For years, the three have nourished a spectral vision of owning a coffee shop, one that is finally becoming tangible.
Inspired by the history of coffee in Europe, brought by Turks, Neal said, through the triangle created by Budapest, Vienna and Prague, they decided to name the shop after that old Czech region, calling it Café Bohemia. Although the meaning of “bohemia” has changed somewhat since it was a purely geographical distinction, Neal said they will be guided by thoughts of old Europe as they create the shop’s atmosphere, adding tinges of Mediterranean flavor to the menu and décor.
For Neal, St. Petersburg’s appeal sprang from its natural boundaries, the Gulf of Mexico and Tampa Bay. The three owners of Café Bohemia were originally looking at a site further west on Central Avenue, he said, but when they saw the vacant quarters that had housed the Realm, they experienced “an emotional response.”
So to this stretch of downtown, past a string of dusty antique shops, lined with derelict storefronts like so many tombstones, their epitaphs reading “for rent” and “for sale,” Neal and his partners hope to bring life again.
“We want the place to be sort of a shell for a lot of good, dynamic stuff to happen inside,” Neal said. Some of his ideas include open mic nights, a book swap program, an occasional DJ, perhaps a regular Sunday showing of obscure '80s flicks.
But according to Neal, what Bohemia becomes will be determined by the community that forms there. There’s no telling whether the crowd from the Realm will return. Mascara-drenched spikeheads munching on such planned fare as tuna salad and vegannaise against a backdrop of old Europe may seem incongruous, but that could be part of the attraction.
The Realm was profiled in last year’s Points South. Read the story here.