Cafe Racer teetering on closure, starts fundraising

The U District's Cafe Racer is in trouble financially and is asking for help through a gofundme.com campaign. The U District's Cafe Racer is in trouble financially and is asking for help through a gofundme.com campaign. Photo: Ap Photo: Ap Image 1 of / 84 Caption Close Cafe Racer teetering on closure, starts fundraising 1 / 84 Back to Gallery

Seattle’s well-known espresso bar, Cafe Racer, seems to have fallen on hard times.

The University District mainstay’s owner, Kurt Geissel, has started a gofundme.com campaign aiming to raise $50,000 to help it stay open, he wrote on the campaign page.

“The debt incurred in the refitting and re-permitting of the building combined with the Roosevelt corridor construction has left us in dire circumstances,” the post read.

After piling on debt for some updates in the space, the cafe was starting to see things bounce back financially, but then the construction along Roosevelt Way Northeast started up. Since then, a lot of the cafe’s business has fallen off, Geissel said.

Geissel said the cafe has never been a huge financial success, but it’s been a pillar of the community and he wants to keep that going.

“I was to the point where ... I couldn’t support it by myself anymore,” he said. “The only way for me to keep it going was to reach out to the community that we’ve supported.”

The little espresso bar (that serves much more than espresso) came into the spotlight in 2012 when a sometime customer of the cafe shot and killed four people there, another near Town Hall Seattle, and eventually himself.

For years, Cafe Racer has been something of a community hub, something Geissel doesn’t want to lose.

“It’s not about me, it’s about the community,” he said. “I’m just the guy who has the space.”

The fundraising campaign was launched Thursday. By 3:30 p.m. Friday, it had already raised more than $11,000 and earned a spot on gofundme.com’s trending list.

It seems the “Cafe Racer Love” Geissel described in the fundraising post is alive and well.

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Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.

