Carpe Diem, 807 East Locust

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2012

This small building at 807 East Locust has housed a variety of businesses since I first moved to Columbia in 1995. Now that I sit down to write about it, I struggle to remember them all. The first thing I remember here was a tattoo parlor, and later there was Carpe Diem. A conversation with Ken Green in the late 1990s let me know that Acorn Books was housed here before their later location on Ninth Street. Now 807 Locust is home to the wonderfully popular Café Poland. This photograph was taken in January 2012, at a time when downtown Columbia was experiencing a wave of demolition and development. From this vantage point on Locust we can see Carpe Diem, and just beyond that is the building on Eighth Street that housed Crazy Music and a few other retail concerns. To the immediate north of that building was an apartment building with north-facing windows overlooking the Tiger Hotel. The parking lot to the immediate west of Carpe Diem is the parking lot for the dry-cleaning business around the corner on Eighth Street, and the metal post set in concrete near the edge of the parking lot once held up a neon sign for the Sudden Service Cleaners. The curious and fascinating thing about this sign was for me was that it didn’t come on until 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. My only photo of the illuminated Sudden Service neon sign was taken on New Year’s Day, in 2000 or 2001, at about 3:30 a.m. after a late night downtown. The buildings in the distance on Eighth Street were demolished more than ten years ago, and a large high rise now dominates the corner where the colorful displays in the Crazy Music windows once mesmerized passersby. This humble frame structure at 807 Locust is still with us in downtown Columbia, now housing the charming Café Poland, whose crepes, pierogies and borsch fill the bellies of hungry Columbians on a daily basis.