The Aroma Round
Photograph Source: Google Maps
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been back to my hometown of Lake Placid, New York. On a recent FaceTime conversation with my mother, she was telling me about some of the changes in town. Apparently, the Gap store has been replaced by an arcade. She believed the long-time empty shop, advertising ‘Gifts and Ammo,’ had been sold.
The latter has always intrigued me. Why was this valuable real estate abandoned for decades, its visible interior seemingly unchanged? Every time I passed the building, I half expected some Adirondack Once-ler to tell me the story via Whisper-ma-Phone in exchange for fifteen cents, a nail, and the shell of a great-great-great grandfather snail.
Slightly less mysterious was a circular structure opposite Saint Agnes Church, which my mother informed me was still empty. According to old issues of The Lake Placid News, it was originally built as the Austrian hospitality headquarters for the 1980 Olympics. Afterwards, it was the first location of High Peaks Cyclery, an outdoor equipment store.
My father has old, branded clothing from High Peaks Cyclery that features the building’s distinctive silhouette. I don’t recall the company in that structure particularly well. I’ll likely always think of the circular building as home to the Aroma Round, a coffee shop, which, as far as I can tell, existed from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
My wife has introduced me to a number of teen dramas from the turn of the millennium which I never watched. One thing I’ve noticed is they all seem to feature an independent cafe where the local youth hang out. For instance, in Smallville, the Superman origin show, it’s the Talon. As I recall, the Aroma Round was kind of like that during its brief existence.
Sometimes, when I was in high school, students would be assigned with jogging around Mirror Lake as part of our physical-education class. A few of us would pretend to do this, only to be picked up by another student with a car when we were out of sight of the teachers. We’d go to the Aroma Round, have a coffee, and then drive back just short of the school.
The singer Lizzy Grant, better known by her stage name Lana Del Rey, is a few years older than I am. I went to summer camp with her sister, whom I knew better. The artist spoke about the cafe with a New York Post reporter, who described her growing up in Lake Placid, writing poetry in “a back booth of the local Aroma Round coffee shop.”
After my quick perusal of the newspaper archives, I’m not exactly sure when the cafe went out of business. However, by my senior year of high school, at least, I believe Starbucks had come to town and the Aroma Round was gone. I don’t know if there was connection between the arrival of one and the departure of the other.
As a socialist, I try not to romanticize mom-and-pop companies, but I miss the Aroma Round. As far as I know, the circular building has been vacant since the coffee store left in the early 2000s. I’ve heard rumors the property was donated to Saint Agnes Church, however I’m not sure if this is true or what, if anything, the building is now used for.
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