“Micro-Histories” Excavates Cafe 9

From rooftop jams to bartop guitar solos, from hip hop to punk rock to doo wop, Cafe Nine has a tangled history as a fixture of New Haven’s music scene. As the venue looks to reopen in the near future, Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, the New Haven Museum’s director of photo-archives, dives into its past in a recent installment of ​“Micro-Histories,” a now nearly year-long series about the corners of the Elm City that make it what it is.

Bischoff-Wurstle is able to date the building on the corner of State and Crown to the early 1880s, due to it ​“appearing on an insurance map as a produce store located in the heart of New Haven’s dry goods district.” Lower State Street, he writes, was ​“New Haven’s bread basket.” But it was also home to ​“shot and beer” bars — ​“small hole-in-the-wall taverns where a diverse cross section of the city would casually convene at all hours of the day for a cheap drink.”

The specific building changed identities several times over the years, from wholesale shop to barber to restaurant, until Michael Reichbart opened Bluebartz Cafe in the storefront in 1972. As Bischoff-Wurstle writes, ​“Blubartz quickly developed a diverse group of regulars. A person’s color, sexual orientation, or beliefs didn’t matter to Michael. He and his staff greeted everyone with a smile and a drink.” In 1974, he bought the building. He sold the business in 1984 and bought it back in 1990. Current owner Paul Mayer bought the business in 2003 with a group of friends, expanding its music programming and renovating the place.

During the pandemic, ​“Cafe Nine as a music venue has been mostly silent aside from a brief series of outdoor rooftop concerts last fall…. But Cafe Nine is a survivor. This corner bar has kept the lights on, the taps flowing, and the music playing for decades. It has anchored the Ninth Square through bust and boom. It’s a local icon in New Haven that straddles the remnants of the past while always looking towards the future. Where seeing an impromptu show with friends or having a random conversation with a stranger can still change your whole world in a night. Cheers to the future and the past of 250 State St.” (Read the full story here.)

The History of ​“Histories”

The museum’s Micro-Histories series began in April 2020, when in response to the museum being closed to the public, ​“we came up with the idea of putting out a weekly newsletter,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. At the same time, the series was ​“the seed of an idea I’ve always had.”

Bischoff-Wurstle started with an entry about the history of the Grand Avenue Bridge. He quickly found ways to make the entries topical. Another April 2020 post focused on New Haven’s experience of the previous pandemic, that of the flu in 1917 and 1918. As Black Lives Matter protestors took to the streets during the summer, Bischoff-Wurstle wrote about New Haven’s final sale of slaves, in 1825 — allowing him to reach back farther to discuss the history of slavery in New Haven and the state of Connecticut, which dated back to the founding of the New Haven Colony. His piece about Cafe Nine comes as the venue is, at last, slotted to reopen in a limited capacity in April.

A year into the series, Bischoff-Wurstle said, ​“it has evolved a little bit more. I’m plotting things out a little bit more.” The Cafe Nine piece took Bischoff-Wurstle a few months, and involved talking to current owner Mayer as well as previous owner (and current landlord) Reichbart. ​“Michael handed me a stack of awesome stuff” about the history of the building and business that he happened to have in his house, Bischoff-Wurstle said.

Writing up the story gave Bischoff-Wurstle a deeper understanding of Cafe Nine’s connection to the past. ​“At its core, it’s still a corner bar,” he said, of the sort that ​“used to be ubiquitous.” Cafe Nine is ​“a bridge from the tradition of the shot-and-beer bars” that once lined State Street. It ​“still has that feel,” even as it’s also a place where you can see ​“four different music acts that are totally different” in one evening.

Talking with Reichbart allowed Bischoff-Wurstle a window into the ​“world of Bluebartz” and Reichbart’s ​“relationship to the city,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“One of his regrets is that he never bought the parking lot” behind the building.

That small remark got at a larger point the conversation with Reichbart revealed. In New Haven ​“in the 1970s, you could take a risk.” A person could ​“buy a building, and if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out.” In Reichbart’s view, ​“it naturally created more diversity — more chance — in the city.” With property values risen quite significantly since then — outstripping inflation and income, that kind of opportunity is ​“gone. It’s a totally different world. You can’t just go start a business. You need much more capital startup to do things, and that’s possibly inhibiting things going forward.”

Bischoff-Wurstle’s emphasis on the history of a single building, or a single business, is a big part of his approach. ​“Everybody knows Cafe Nine but nobody knows Cafe Nine. It’s like that with a lot of places in the community,” he said. He’s pulled to the smaller stories as a historian. ​“I want to talk to you about your history,” Bischoff-Wurstle said, explaining that many of the micro-histories are drawn from the physical artifacts the museum has collected. Many such objects, he said, are currently sitting in people’s houses around town, their own stories waiting to be discovered. ​“I’m that guy that’s going to call you about your stuff,” he said. ​“We’re of the city. The stuff in your house that’s laying around is often the stuff we’re looking for. It’s not junk. I want to know that story.”

But the choice of subject is also driven by the needs of today. ​“I want to talk about these businesses and parts of our community that, particularly in the pandemic, are feeling the burn. I want to focus some positive attention,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“They’re still there and they’re going to be open in a coupe months, and you can go buy drinks and see a lot of shows.”

Meanwhile, as the New Haven Museum considers its own reopening to the public sometime, Bischoff-Wurstle said it plans to hang onto some of the practices it developed out of necessity during the pandemic. ​“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s about embracing the online presence,” he said.

In addition to the micro-histories and Zoom events, Bischoff Wurstle created a video tour of the museum’s ​“Factory” exhibit, about the many lives of the New Haven Clock Company building on Hamilton Street.

“‘Factory’ has been open for over a year, but for all intents and purposes the run was short. I had to figure out how to get the story out there.” He enlisted filmmaker Gorman Bechard to help him create the video version. ​“When they were up and I looked at the numbers, I thought, ​‘that’s a couple thousand more people than would have walked in the doors.” People from all around the world watched.”

Video production, streaming, online exhibitions — ​“once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it,” he said. ​“A lot of these things, I had a vague idea how to do” before the Covid-19 shutdowns, ​“but during the pandemic, I just dove in.” As he considers future exhibits, he better understands the shows in the context of a ​“larger ecosystem,” he said. ​“The physical is cool. But what’s the online part?… It’s really embracing things and taking it forward…. There’s clearly a place for the physical story” and in-person exhibits, but with getting the hang of online tools, ​“it’s become a lot easier to reach out and grab people, and tell them something about this town.”