NYC’s first-ever dog-friendly café, with locations both in East Village and Williamsburg, announced this past February that they’d be shutting their doors for good after a six year run. And after announcing just two weeks later they’d be remaining open after all thanks to a fundraiser that raised $250,000, the café has once again announced that they’ll be closing at the end of this May.
But this time not all hope is lost!
Thankfully, only the café’s Williamsburg location will close. So while Brooklynites will now have to travel a bit further to grab a coffee and treat with their pup, the East Village location will remain open.
In an Instagram post they stated:
After much consideration and evaluation, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Brooklyn location at the end of this month. We know that many of you donated in the hopes of keeping Brooklyn open, and we are heartbroken to let you down. This was not a decision we made lightly. We tried partnering with other local businesses, hiring an events manager, adding more programming, and other ways to bring in foot traffic, but despite our best efforts, sales have just been too weak to support the store…We’ll miss all of our regulars in Brooklyn and all of the amazing artists and brands that teamed up with us over the last year.
Back in February the café wrote that money issues were what prompted their decision to close, though they rallied together with their community to raise $250,000 to remain open.
So now with the announcement of their Williamsburg closure New Yorkers are understandably upset–and some are even, well, quite angry.
One Instagram user commented on the post stating “Will you be returning the $250,000 donated 2 months ago to keep this location open?”
Another added “If you had charged an entry fee for non-dog-owners this could have been avoided. The amount of times I’ve tried to bring my dog to a Boris and Horton only for 50% of the cafe to be people with AirPods in, plugging away on their laptops with no dog is ridiculous.”
Regarding the $250,000, the team at Boris & Horton told Greenpointers:
The funds were allocated to pay the salaries for a General Manager and an Events Manager and to make some repairs to our East Village location including updating our HVAC system and some refrigeration so we could continue to run through the warm months.
At the end of the day all we can do is support the East Village location and hope things run smoothly over there! Learn more about Boris & Horton here.