Walkabout: Garfield cafe aims to give people space as much as coffee
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Elliott Williams, left, is proprietor of the ersatz Catapult Pop-Up Cafe, a one-month experiment as an alternative office for independent workers.
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Many of us have been there. Sitting in a cafe with our laptops, the third hour morphing into the fourth, we buy a second cup of coffee out of guilt, though no one has said anything.
We just know it's kind of leechy to be using their free Wi-Fi and contributing maybe $5 to their coffers over four hours.
This is not the reason business partners Elliott Williams and Kevin Boyle decided to experiment on the genre. But it is a reason Brian Shope, Marc Rettig and Hannah DuPlessis spent part of their workday Monday at the experimental pop-up cafe Catapult, at 5151 Penn Ave. in Garfield.
Catapult is open every day but Sundays through the end of October, from 10 a.m. to midnight, as a workplace and a networking site for creative workers.
Mr. Williams, 29, has a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in human/computer interaction. The cafe is an interesting intersection of his academic studies and the cohort that populates such places: people who interact with computers.
He said he wants to give people an alternative to the isolation of the home office, or help them avoid spending uncertain or shoestring capital on office rent. Catapult is there to help people work outside the box, not for Mr. Williams to sell coffee.
"Support is what a lot of indie workers need," he said. "I can create an alternative argument for people to come to Pittsburgh or to stay here. With the level of communications we have now, I don't think there need to be big offices, and you don't have to be in a cubicle."
Mr. Williams is working through the potential for this to be a business model, including monthly memberships based on whether you need a desk and quiet space to meet clients or if you just seek use of a printer.
People who don't drink coffee at Catapult are asked to pay $1 an hour.
On Monday, Mr. Shope, a social networking consultant, worked at his laptop on the lower level while Mr. Rettig and Ms. DuPlessis worked at either end of a long couch on a small stage-like level in back.
As I watched them working apart but together, I thought of the most catalytic, fruitful and focused time of my life as a potential artist. It was in Sigrid Shafagh's studio just down the street from 5151 Penn.
First Published October 4, 2011 12:00 am
