It’s said that when celebrating your first wedding anniversary, you should eat the last slice of your wedding cake together — but how do you celebrate the first anniversary of your restaurant? For the owners of The Shop, the answer is breakdancing.
Since opening last spring at 219 Washington Street, The Shop is known for its sweet and savory crepes, as well as its extensive drink and coffee menu. Though the kitchen closed early on the evening of the anniversary party held on Friday, the lines at the bar were long and all of the tables in the restaurant were full.
Beginning at 8 p.m., breakdancers from Ithaca College, Cornell University and the Binghamton community performed on the sidewalk and street outside of the cafe. This was followed by a beatbox performance as well as a performance by Latin roots band, Girot Rumber o.
Mike Sherwood, one of the dancers with the Binghamton-based group Seven Sessions, explained that The Shop’s co-owner Eugenie Zynda wanted to host an event that the city could benefit from.
“She wanted to bring something from New York City to here,” Sherwood said. “Something that kind of embodied what she thought Binghamton needed, a revitalization of the arts.”
Zynda shared that her work in the Bronx after graduate school informed the choice to open The Shop, and that her experience breakdancing inspired a unique approach to starting a discussion about Binghamton’s urban landscape. In the Bronx, she worked for a women’s housing and economic development organization, specializing in sustainability management and getting to know residents of affordable housing complexes.
“We built the Bronx Music Heritage Center,” Zynda explained. “So, basically what was happening was we were contacting all of the old school rappers, break dancers, beatboxers, everyone we could ever find, to come to this Bronx Music Heritage Center to teach young children fun art forms, like breakdancing and jazz music and beatboxing and everything.”
One attendee, Michael Jennings, said that the city is in need of The Shop.
“I think The Shop is a great new place in Binghamton,” said Jennings, a senior majoring in environmental studies. “I feel like Binghamton either has really grungy college bars or … more upscale bars, but The Shop is the nice, niche place for people our age. They have nice drinks, [and] you can dance if you want to.”
And dancing — of all kinds — is exactly what Zynda imagined when she brought her idea for The Shop to Binghamton.
“You see there’s graffiti artwork [on the walls] and it’s very urban, so a big concept of The Shop is just to kind of celebrate the re-urbanization of Downtown Binghamton,” she said.
Zynda says the goal is to ensure that kids in the area see Downtown Binghamton as their own.
She added that she wants to help establish “an understanding that urban lifestyles can be celebrated and healthy and that they [children] can enter that re-urbanization, [too].”