R.I.P. Marshall Street Cafe

How's this for irony?

On the eve of Broad Appetit, with 25,000 people expected in Jackson Ward tomorrow to eat, we lost one of our neighborhood restaurants this afternoon.

And by lost, I don't mean went out of business, I mean gone.

The building is in rubble.

I lost power briefly this morning, so I didn't think anything of it when it went out again an hour or so ago.

But the sirens that followed were a sure sign that something major had happened and it wasn't long before a neighbor called and told me to get over to the Marshall Street Cafe...or what was left of it

Approaching the corner where the restaurant used to sit now sat a crumbling building with a car squarely in the restaurant and the one that hit it right behind it.

It was like a cross-section of a building diagram; you could see the remaining part of the apartment above the restaurant and where the Marshall Street Cafe used to be was a tangle of cars surrounded by brick and debris.

Sadly, it seems likely that the building will have to come down completely.

It was one of those classic corner buildings with with two walls of windows converging at a corner door.

While it wasn't a trendy spot, but it was a reliable neighborhood place, here, and had a devoted happy hour crowd. I

A place that will be missed in the neighborhood, for sure.

And on top of that, we've lost an historical commercial building in a neighborhood built on commerce as well as residences.

The restaurant business is a notoriously tough one, but what happened to the Marshall Street Cafe amounts to nothing more than the worst kind of luck.

Someone ran a red light, caused an accident and now a local business is destroyed.

I sincerely hope the owners of Marshall Street Cafe reopen somewhere else in J-Ward, but the fact is, that corner will never look the same.

Sadly, Jackson Ward may have lost another piece of its history this afternoon.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that it can be rebuilt.