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Once a hospital, now a home: Mesa Roca Books and Brew
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It was the old Shoe Hospital, but now the stone house at 1524 Broadway Ave. is Mesa Roca Books and Brew.
A quiet and quaint coffee house, Mesa Roca not only offers an abundance and variety of literature, but one-of-a-kind comfort – like being in a real home.
The house is divided into three areas. The front door opens into the main living room that is divided into two by large bookshelves. There is plenty of seating available at the tables by the windows, in the soft corner chairs or in the center of the room in the love seat area.
Immediately past the small burgundy love seat is the counter where Dawson Taylor Coffee is available along with homemade baked goods.
A passageway leads to the back room that is furnished with a kitchen table, chairs and more of the bookshelves that hold hundreds (perhaps thousands) of used books. All of the books are for sale. An oasis of random literature, the coffee house is lined with shelves and shelves of different kinds of books. The atmosphere “lends itself to studying and visiting and being together,” Kelly Christensen said as she browsed the shelves for books.
Though the books seem to make up someone’s personal library, the selection is wide enough to find teaching material or great entertainment.
There is a history shelf; a shelf for art, photography, and interior decorating; one for books about traveling; one, ceiling high, with paperbacks. You can find books on the course of Mexican History, on the Rape of Tahiti, on Japanese culture, etc. etc. Plenty of classics litter the shelves: Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Cervantes.
On any day, a college student (or professor for that matter) can stroll into the quiet house and grab a good read while relaxing and decompressing from the loud, fast pace of campus life only a few blocks away.
Ken Lunstrum, a regular patron of Mesa Roca, can often be found in the back room holding his English tutoring sessions. He spends at least twenty hours a week in the coffee house and has been doing so for almost an entire year.
The SUB was just too loud and busy for Lunstrum. He tried tutoring at Starbucks, but found the atmosphere equally difficult to study in. Neither were “homey like this place,” Lunstrum said.
At Mesa Roca college students can enjoy the comforts of a quiet place to study without television as a distraction; without the sterile, deathly quiet of a library; and without loud music blaring from the speakers like other coffee places. It’s a place where you can feel at home.
Hours of business are Monday through Saturday, 9a.m. to 6 p.m.
Julia C. Arredondo
Culture Writer
