The XX Factor in Lawrenceville

Like most stories on this street, Coca Cafe starts with a group of women and an idea.

It is early 2004 and Janice Webb-Donatelli wants to sell Coca, a coffee shop she had started two years earlier at 3811 Butler Street, a stone’s throw from the 40th Street Bridge.  Initially, she is approached by all manner of proprietors wanting to sell, in her words, “wings, dings and pizza.”

But she wanted something more for Coca, which she had started simply because she couldn’t find any place in Lawrenceville to get a decent cup of coffee. But running a café was not how Donatelli wanted to spend her days. She had other plans.

Enter Jeanine Manint, Melanie Ritchey and Carrie Rudolph, three young women who had met met several years earlier working at a Shadyside bed and breakfast. They shared with Donatelli their vision of what they thought the café could become and sold her on it.  

Manint, Ritchy and Rudolph, none of whom had run a business before, consulted other local chefs. They brainstormed new culinary creations. They met in the mornings and made lists of ingredients they would need for the day. They bought fresh. They experimented in the kitchen.     At first, business was slow, but word began to spread. A year after they took over Coca, the Mattress Factory approached them about starting a second site in the museum.

Phase Two

Flash forward three years. Their Sunday brunches regularly fill the café’s two rooms with customers spilling outside on the sidewalk waiting for their cell phone to ring, announcing their ready table.
 
In the interim, Manint, Ritchey and Rudolph handed back the reins of their second site to the Mattress Factory café and moved on to a second, even more successful, adventure. The trio close Coca’s doors everyday at 3 p.m. so they can accommodate an ever-growing catering business.

These three women are among a group of proprietors of boutiques, cafes and galleries who are changing the landscape of Butler Street in Lawrenceville, especially in a multi-block stretch from the cusp of where Lawenceville meets the Strip District to the 40th Street Bridge.
    
Oh, and the majority of business owners along this stretch of sidewalk happen to be female. And while all possess a strong work ethic, they allow that maybe that extra X on their 23rd chromosome give them an edge.
    
 “I think we get along lot better,” says Manint of the rapport she shares with her two co-owners and other proprietors along Butler.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?
 
In their block alone, this cadre includes Kristen Rockwell, proprietor of O’Bannon Oriental Carpets next door to Coca, and, across the street, Elements, a furniture/gallery/vintage boutique operated by Shelly Maiese.

Last year, Kristen Rockwell relocated O’Bannon Oriental Carpets from Squirrel Hill to the storefront next to Coca, where she sells wool, hand-spun, one-of-a-kind carpets from such far reaches as Armenia, India, Pakistan and Turkey.

And it is not uncommon to find Rockwell walking barefoot making her way across a “9 by 144-inch” Turkey Mamluk carpet. Her store is a museum, with woolen creations of brightly-colored swirls and intricate designs, hung in the same manner as a painting or a photograph. “That’s why I call it ‘Art Underfoot’,” Rockwell says of her store.

Rockwell had graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in textiles and was working for a weaver, when she approached the owners of O’Bannons in Squirrel Hill about a second job. She started working at O’Bannons in 1996 and within two years, she was running the store. On Jan. 2, 1999, she owned the business.  

Last year, she moved the store from Squirrel Hill to Lawenceville. And everyday she faces challenges trying to succeed in a business traditionally dominated by men. “I don’t cower to challenges,” Rockwell says, adding that she has had to prove herself time and again.

O’Bannon, like all female business owners along this stretch, possesses the Pittsburgh work ethic made famous by steel workers and coal miners. Yet, all seem to have reached the mutual understanding that ultimately, their success will depend on much more than their own daily receipts.

All share a common goal and that is to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind – that Lawrenceville is the place to come for art, for furnishings, for cutting-edge design, or for anyone with a hankering for a three-cheese omelet.
    
And so they work together, often store hopping for impromptu meetings to brainstorm on ways to draw crowds to their stretch of sidewalk. Out of one of those impromptu meetings, Final Fridays, where shops stay open until 11 p.m., was born.
    
It is this type of collaboration and support that Alexis Alexander, owner of Accessorize, a boutique dedicated to the fine art of accessories, believes will keep Lawrenceville thriving and feed her own business.

“It’s not like a dog-eat-dog world because of the support we give each other. We keep each other up on special events, what we’re planning to do next, how we are expanding and growing our businesses,” Alexander says. She opened Accessorize in November and says she hopes to expand her business in the coming year and thinks she will do so with the support she receives daily.  

Getting it All Together

On a recent September afternoon, Alexander stops by Pavement, a shoe boutique a few storefronts down from her own. Daily visits are common.

“We all have signs that say ‘went to Coca’ to get coffee or ‘Went to  Sugar’,” says Alissa Martin who, with her younger sister and business partner, Jessica Martin, opened Pavement 18 months earlier.

Alissa, 34, encouraged Jessica, 29, to go into business, in part, because she wanted her younger sister to move to Pittsburgh.  The two decided on a footwear boutique because both felt it was difficult to find good shoes in Pittsburgh.

They decided on Lawrenceville because they liked the neighborhood, its urban vibe and the crop of boutiques, galleries and storefronts that were just beginning to open their doors. Alissa now lives on 46th Street while Jessica recently purchased a home just off 46th Street.
    
The only shoe selling experience they had between them was the several months Alissa spent selling Dr. Martens in college.     But they learned on the job and in March they will celebrate their two-year anniversary.
 
On this afternoon, Jessica, whose background is in horticulture, is off building fixtures for the store while Alissa takes a moment to describe her hopes and plans for this stretch of Lawrenceville and the Pittsburgh region.  Pittsburgh needs to realize that the key to revitalizing the city is young people opening businesses, she says.

 “If you don’t see it in Pittsburgh, do it. A lot of young people complain that Pittsburgh doesn’t have a lot of amenities that other people have. Be an entrepreneur. Do it. Pittsburgh is really a good place to start a business. It’s more affordable and attainable than a city like Chicago or New York,” she says.

As for Lawrenceville?
    
“I would like this street to be a premier destination. I want it to remain eclectic and not elitest. I want it to have something for everyone and not just be for people who are wealthy,” she says.

The Sustainability Factor
    
Oh, and one more thing, Alissa would like to see Lawrenceville go green. She points across the street to the roof of a warehouse, an ideal place, in her view, for a rooftop garden given the lack of backyards in the town.

Pavement’s décor subsists almost entirely of sustainable or recycled materials including a bench for customers to try on shoes hails from a local antique store and a sunflower seedboard table that she scored from Artemis, just down the street.

Artemis brings up Alissa’s second favorite topic, the woman she calls the “unofficial mayor of Lawrenceville” Janice Webb-Donatelli, the original owner of Coca Café. Donatelli, according to Martin, is doing some of the most innovative work in “green” building on the East Coast, and serves as a mentor to new business owners along Butler.

“I came here in ’99,” says Donatelli a few days later on a weekday afternoon while sitting in the backroom of Artemis, a business dedicated to helping people and businesses rebuild and remodel with sustainable and energy efficient materials.  The back door stands open welcoming the afternoon light and a cooling breeze.

“Like a lot of the women who have opened their own businesses here, Lawrenceville presented an opportunity that you could start your own and afford to start you own,” Donatelli says.

And what she started upon arrival in Lawrenceville after retiring from teaching, was an antiques business. When the lack of high-grade caffeine started to get to her, she converted it to a coffee shop and opened Coca Café. Not long after, she sold it to Manning, Ritchey and Rudolph.
    
And though all three were nervous, Donatelli encouraged them to take the chance, earning her the nickname, “the unofficial mayor.”

“I said sometimes a door opens and you have to gamble, you have to take that opportunity,” she recalls.     Through Coca, Donatelli had met Linda Metropulos, founder of the Ice House artist studio in Lawrenceville, of and the two opened Artemis on Earth Day 2005.  

“When we first opened, it was primarily homeowners who were in here.  A lot of the owners in this area came from across the country via the 16:62 design promotion that was going on that drew people to this area,” says Donatelli, referring to the designated creative hub between the 16th Street Bridge in the Strip District to the 62nd Street Bridge in Lawrenceville.

Several times a month, Artemis also opens it doors to design students from area colleges and universities and also hosts workshops. Their clientele has grown and now includes builders and architects.

“Now the contractors are coming in which means the population is driving it because the contractors will answer to their clients. They are the ones you want in here because they are going to do the building,” says Donatelli.

The plethora of female-owned businesses along Butler Street does not end at the 40th Street Bridge.  

A block down on the other side of 40th, at the corner of Butler and Fisk streets, Beth McHenry works at Evolve Modern Hairdressing, a business she opened on August 1 of last year. McHenry lived in Lawrenceville for about a year before deciding to open Evolve.

“There was a real market for what I wanted to do here, which was personalized service or working one-on-one with people rather than being in a big salon atmosphere,” McHenry says.

She set up shop in the tiny corner space, just a loveseat, shears, dyes and a beautician chair and her dog Romie in a 350-squuare-foot space at the corner of Butler and Fisk streets.

And while Lawrenceville maintains its old school character, it also continues to evolve.

“There’s something special about Lawrenceville,” she says.

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Heidi Price last wrote about Dearheart and characters in the Strip District, an article that was one of the best-read for that month.

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Captions:

Janice Webb-Donatelli

Open for business

Kristen Rockwell

Rugs

Alexis Alexander

Boots

Alissa and Jessica Martin

All photographs copyright © Brian Cohen