The cybercafe

[Steve Hoffman]

The Ballad Of the Cybercafe

Mixing java and Java seemed like a good idea at one time, but it
faded quickly. In city after city, cybercafes have quietly closed or
turned into something else.

Michel Marriott
NY Times 4/16/98


Hunched over a computer, Mike Rivera pecked at its keyboard, keeping
up his end of a conversation in a chat room. "Hey, I think I got a
lesbian on here," he said in a stage whisper. 

Rivera, who is 19, does not have a computer at home, he said, so he
was trading messages with an unseen stranger on a computer at a
cybercafe, which sells computer access, light food and coffee. 

But Rivera was the only person seated at the neat row of six shiny
computers on a recent afternoon at XS New York, a cybercafe and video
game arcade in midtown Manhattan. Worse, Rivera, who works behind the
pizza counter at XS, was not even a paying customer. "Someone left it
on so I started messing with it," he said before finally returning to
the pizza counter. 

The deserted computers at XS New York are not unusual. In city after
city, cybercafes have quietly closed or turned into something else. 

And many of the ones that are still in business are attracting fewer
and fewer visitors -- perhaps surprising, given the ballyhoo when
cybercafes became popular in the mid-1990's. 

In a way, the decline of the cybercafe is an indicator of the
increasing strength of America's embrace of the computer and the
Internet. As people who sampled the World Wide Web in cafes found
themselves seduced by it, and as more computers became affordable,
many got their own computers and speedy home connections. Along the
way, the cybercafes started drying up. 

The notion of a cybercafe -- a place for Net surfers to socialize on
a tide of gourmet coffee -- is at odds with how most people want to
use computers, even in their leisure time. Those who Web surf, read
e-mail, write or program or do just about anything else on a computer
often do so in solitude. Paying $7 to $14 an hour for a seat in a
cafe to work or play on a computer is not necessarily logical. 

"Those two ideas don't mesh well," said Pearl Mitchell, an acting
assistant treasurer for a Wall Street bank and trust company and a
part-time model. 

Mitchell, 21, who was recently in a New York cybercafe shopping on
the Internet for her first computer, said that once she bought her
dream desktop machine, she would sharply cut back on her visits to
cybercafes. She has been going three to five times a week to check
her e-mail and browse her favorite sites, she said. 

It is precisely that sort of change in computing habits, say many
associated with cybercafes in the United States, that have these
Internet watering holes dying off like dinosaurs after that really
big meteor crash. 

The IDT Megabite Cafe, for example, which opened two years ago in the
shadow of some of Manhattan's biggest computer shops, closed in
February. Its owner, Gaddy Haymov, reopened the cafe as a kosher pizza
and sushi shop -- without the computers -- called the Original
Boychicks. 

The @Cafe in Greenwich Village, once very popular, stands empty and
boarded up. Weathered fliers cling to its bricks, reminding passers-by
of the computer cruising that could be had inside not so long ago. 

Cybercafes have recently closed in cities as different as Washington
and Louisville, Ky. Even in San Francisco, ground zero for the
current explosion in Internet development and the holy land for
worshipers of all things computer, the cybercafe scene is struggling
to survive. 

"It is on the decline in terms of the numbers of people using them,"
said Craig Phillips, a documentary filmmaker who last year completed
a short film about cybercafe culture in San Francisco. "It reached a
peak out here before I was doing this film." 

Phillips, a 29-year-old administrative assistant for the California
Humanities Council, said he had gone from visiting cybercafes in the
San Francisco Bay area frequently to visiting them only occasionally.
"For being places that provided a way to socialize, to meet a bunch
of people, that's not happening as much these days," he said. 

In fact, he said, while making his 25-minute documentary,
"Connected," he discovered that cybercafes, particularly one called
the Horseshoe in the Haight-Ashbury section of the city, had severely
scaled back computer services. 

Some computer cafes have become a haven for young people simply
looking for a place to hang out more than a place to go on line.
"Some tourist would come in and then leave quickly," Phillips noted. 

But in many other countries, especially in Central America, Africa and
parts of Western Europe, where computer and Internet use has
significantly lagged behind that in the United States, the cybercafe
scene still sizzles. 

And in Hawaii, where the rates of computer and Internet use are among
the highest in the United States, cybercafes generally remain
popular. Some, like the three-year-old Internet Cafe in Honolulu,
attract mostly students and tourists who didn't pack their computers
along with their bathing suits and suntan lotion. 

"A lot of people are still coming in just for fun," said Tresy Lorch,
manager of the cafe. "We try to keep up and offer people what they
want." At the Internet Cafe, that means a friendly atmosphere with
reasonable rates and superfast Internet connections. 

But part of the cybercafes' continuing allure in Hawaii, 5,000 miles
from the mainland, is that they provide a way for people to come
together and ease the sense of the island state's geographic
isolation, some say. "Some people really feel that," said Olin Lagon,
who works in Hawaii as a director of special projects for Worldpoint,
a maker of language translation software. "Besides being so different
and clean, Hawaii is the world's most isolated land mass. Here,
cybercafes are like sophisticated nightclubs." 

or different reasons, cybercafes are also flourishing in foreign
lands. In Mexico, for instance, Internet directories of cybercafes
list 15 in the Mexico City area alone and some 50 nationwide. 

"We opened 18 months ago with four machines," said Israel Salgado
Leyva, manager of the Cyberspace Cafe, a popular spot in Condesa, a
neighborhood of leafy parks and Art Deco apartment buildings in
Mexico City. "Now we have 14 Pentium computers." He added that he
planned to install 10 more soon. 

In Milan, groups of people routinely visit cybercafes to jointly
cruise Internet sites, said Paolo Bardicchia, an Italian-born
business consultant who works in England. 

Any Net sites featuring the actor Leonardo DiCaprio have been
especially popular for communal consumption since he starred in the
billion-dollar film "Titanic." 

"It is much different there than here," said Bardicchia, who stopped
in the XS cybercafe recently during a business trip to New York.
"They are not places where people go alone." 

At the Virtual World Internet Cafe, which is in the Virtual World
Electronics Store in Moscow, the scene is decidedly futuristic.
Customers, whose ages ranged from 11 to 17 on a recent afternoon,
occupy the cafe's nine computer workstations in a well-lighted space
where the central decoration is an illuminated photo of two hands
reaching across a globe. The Internet access here is free, and no
purchases are necessary. But those wishing to surf the Net must get
on the waiting list early because vacancies last only long enough for
someone to leave a seat and another person to sit down. 

Yevgeny Alichinikov, a college freshman and self-proclaimed movie
addict, was using his hour on the computer to surf the Complete Oscar
site. "I can get everything on films on the Web," said Alichinikov.
"My favorite actor is Rutger Hauer, and this way I can find out all
the films that he's been in. Now I am looking for films with Glenn
Close." 

In San Francisco, Jonathan Nelson, chief executive of Organic Online,
an interactive design and communications company there, said
cybercafes were a logical beginning for people in countries like
Russia and China, where the Internet is still a novelty. 

"They are a first step, and then you move on," said Nelson, whose
work takes him around the world. "That paradigm is happening all over
the world. Cybercafes in South Africa are very interesting now."    

he key to keeping a cybercafe alive in the United States these days
is to offer more to prospective customers than simply snappy computers
and superfast T-1 lines to the Internet. 

At @Alan's, a cybercafe that opened two and a half years ago in
Montclair, N.J., its eight computers, juice bar, coffee and light
foods are still attracting customers, said its manager, Michael
Townsend. As he spoke, a half-dozen preteen-age boys were at the
computers, mostly playing games. Nonetheless, Townsend acknowledged,
"it's tough to stay in business." 

To beef up revenues, he said, the cybercafe also offers, for a fee,
of course, computer training and Web site development. 

The Internet Cafe, which opened three years ago in a former botanica
in New York's East Village, has rooted its appeal in a decidedly
low-tech décor and low-key atmosphere. The modest cybercafe is
essentially a long, narrow room that has four computers, a color
printer and scanner and is filled with comfortable tables and chairs
and a small bar and television in the back. The cafe's stereo
speakers are partial to vintage Sinatra and midtempo jazz. There is
also coffee and an extensive beer list.

"This is the kind of place that we hope people would enjoy even if
there weren't any computers here," said Arthur Perley, a computer
consultant and the cafe's owner. 

Saying that early cybercafes leaned on the "flash and glitz" of
emerging technologies, Perley concluded: "Once the dazzle wears off,
once the hype wears off, then the reality is sitting there. What is
it? 

"Oh, it's a computer sitting in the corner, and you have a cafe." 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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