Caffe Lena celebrates 50th birthday

Fifty years of memories

By THOMAS DIMOPOULOS

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Sarah Craig sat with her back to the stage on a quiet, weekday morning inside the cafe, the room bathed in a natural light that poured in through the Phila Street windows.

She looked out at the small room and its 85 seats, and pointed to the table with the low-hanging lip where Bob Dylan was famously photographed when he visited the cafe as a young, unknown performer, long before the age of the compact disc, the iPod and the World Wide Web.

A half-century later, the outside world marches on. Inside the intimate performance space, Caffe Lena continues to find a way to survive.

"The business model is absurd," said Craig, who joined the Caffe Lena staff in 1995 and is its executive director.

"We fall short about $35,000 a year, doing about 400 events a year with a volunteer staff," she said.

"We make up that $35,000. And we keep going," Craig said.

The staff includes as many as 40 rotating volunteers who help out with shows and another 20 who contribute with other tasks. The cafe is run by a small paid staff and a board of directors.

The cafe's annual operating budget is about $250,000. A spirited group of cafe members and friends formed a nonprofit corporation and purchased the building and an adjoining parking lot in the 1990s, for which it owes a mortgage balance of about $150,000.

"It was the will of the people to keep it going," Craig said.

"People were simply unwilling to let the cafe go and ultimately pulled together to keep it open," said George Ward, a patron of the cafe since the fall of 1960 and a board member since "before there even was a board," he said.

Ward became involved in 1989 on the night that its founder, Lena Spencer, was injured after falling down the stairs of the cafe. She died a few weeks later.

"Lena was headed to a night out in Albany that night. She was going to see a performance by Spalding Gray, who at one time lived in Saratoga and became a dear friend of Lena's," Ward said. "She blacked out and fell down the stairs. My late wife, Vaughn, and I walked in just as she was being taken away by ambulance. I've been involved from that moment on.

"Lena meant a tremendous amount to a lot of people. There was a lot of grieving that went on there was a lot of lack of clarity for a while," Ward said.

Eventually, a group came together and purchased the building.

Today, some revenue comes in the way of rent from the two restaurants and a retail store that are located on the first floor of the building.

Other revenue sources include cafe memberships, donations and benefit performances. Some cafe-sponsored shows have branched out to other communities and have been staged in larger venues in Schenectady, Troy and Glens Falls.

"We call that Caffe Lena on the road," Craig said.

"When I first came here, the cafe was still missing Lena. It was learning how to be independent of its mama," Craig said. "Now that we hit 50, it's time to look at that next step. What is it going to take for the cafe to go the next 50 years?"

Published in The Post-Star, Thursday, May 13, 2010