CULTURE

Bird’s Eye Cafe Gathers Roseway Neighbors for Coffee and Rose City Bluff Restoration

The group of volunteer neighbors meet weekly to remove bramble and plant native pollinators.

Bird's Eye Cafe (Sophia Mick)

Ever find yourself along Rose City Bluff and spot the handwritten yard signs for the Bird’s Eye Cafe? Maybe one better—you’ve been to said “cafe,” a pop-up tent handing out free coffee and popsicles to passersby on Sunday mornings.

Rose City resident Tommy Jarvis kicked off the weekly offering last summer. He and his family provide the goods, along with baked treats from neighbors (sometimes coffee is donated by Yigebe Coffee or Denizens Cafe).

“The first weekend we did it there were neighbors [who said], ‘Hey, how long have you been here?’ ‘Forty-five years, how about you?’ ‘Thirty-two years’—they lived like two blocks from each other, had never met,” Jarvis tells WW on a recent hot Sunday morning. “This is what this is for. And an effort to celebrate the community.”

It’s also an effort to draw attention to the work neighbors have been doing for the past seven years on the bluff. Every Sunday, volunteers meet at 9:30 am at the half-mile slope along the Rose City Golf Course and dig in, removing blackberry brambles and making way for native pollinators. Reed Lewis, another Rose City Bluff neighbor who runs the effort, is currently growing more than 400 plants in his yard to plant along the bluff this fall.

The group says it started as a guerrilla effort, gaining more members along the way. Now recognized by the city and dubbed Rose City Bluff Restoration (rosecitybluff.org), it partners with several organizations, including Southeast Uplift, but the effort remains a neighborly one, with more volunteers always welcome.

“There’s a lot of talent that came together because we got to know each other,” says neighbor Suzanne Briggs. “The plant experts,” she nods toward Lewis, “we have IT people, we have people who’ve been part of grassroots organizing. So when you put all that together on a Sunday morning, it’s amazing. We’re out of the guerrilla and actually into a plan.”

“I think we still have one foot in the guerrilla,” Lewis says.


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Robin Bacior

Robin Bacior is WW's Arts & Culture Editor. She's worked as a music writer for many years, and is, in fact, a musician.

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