A little dingy and smoky when it opened it in 1991, it really came into its own 20 years later, in the 2010s, by which time it was serving a full café menu-pancakes in the morning, tuna melts in the afternoon-to a clientele that looked younger and cleaner and better-dressed by the day. There was Moose and Sadie’s, the seminal coffee shop on 3rd Avenue North. But who keeps records on soul? Well, hopefully, they’ll track down some old-timer who held onto their wits long enough to sing about the Golden Age of Peter Kirihara, when Loopers from antiquity could achieve full cultural expression solely by living in each of his three neighborhood joints.
How do you find the soul of a neighborhood? Years from now, historians will determine their mileposts for the origins of what we now know as the North Loop-they’ll dutifully research whose idea it was to use an old streetcar line as its marketing handle, note when the first mixed-use condo was built, document when it landed its first real grocery store.
