Robust Coffee Lounge

Tom Couri

Across the street from a Woodlawn health clinic and adjacent to a vacant lot which houses protest movement against this health clinic for the shuttering of its mental health services sits Robust Coffee Lounge. Established in 2009 at 63^rd and Woodlawn Avenue, Robust is a coffee shop with all of the characteristics that make a coffee shop successful: unique ambience (an industrial feel with exposed ceilings and old license plates and street signs on the walls), comfortable furniture, and good hot coffee. Every time I’ve been to Robust a steady stream of customers have filtered in and out, to drink, eat, lounge, and loiter. What I love to do at Robust, though, is meet. From meeting with my SSP team to discuss next week’s planning to sitting with prominent community members discussing the history and future of Woodlawn, Robust is the perfect local establishment for meetings. Not because of its delicious food or drink or any of the reasons I outlined above, really. For me, meeting at Robust means supporting a unique business in Woodlawn, a shop that will hopefully serve as a template for other businesses in the Woodlawn community. Joyce and Rudy Nimocks, longtime Woodlawn residents and activists, told our team of the various businesses that used to line the streets of Woodlawn before the 1960s riots, of the lack of vacant lots and of a community teeming with 80,000 residents in its heyday. Sitting and meeting in Robust, talking about Woodlawn—its past, present, and future—makes me optimistic about the neighborhood’s resurgence. I hope Robust has their rent locked in.