The immediate focus, as you’d expect, was on the battle over what the place is called. A long-running Syracuse coffee shop was packed last Friday morning at Franklin Square, where customers representing several generations of regulars showed up for a 30th anniversary celebration of the opening — and to listen as Joe Heath explained how so much meaning is implicit in that establishment’s three-word name:
Freedom of Espresso.
Heath, 79, a Syracuse human rights lawyer who is well-known as the general counsel for the Onondaga Nation, described himself as “hard-wired to resist” when corporations — or governments — try to bulldoze everyday people.
In that way, he said it only made sense many years ago when he agreed to help old friend Anna Dobbs and her then-husband, John — while they’re no longer married, the couple remains neighbors, business partners and friends — in their fight to stop Federal Express, a corporate colossus, from forcing them to change the name of their operation.
Heath did that work, as Anna put it, “pro beano.”
The synopsis: Anna is a Nottingham High School graduate who ended up as a young woman in Alaska, where she met John, a stained glass artist. She started a specialty produce and natural foods business, returning every autumn to Syracuse to buy thousands of pounds of apples. During those visits, Anna recalls, John would often wistfully note how hard it was to hunt down a quality cup of coffee, much less a quiet place to drink it.
The notion that maybe they could find a way to fill that hole — mingled with some family concerns and realities in Syracuse — caused them to join with Anna’s brother, Dave Ruston, in opening a shop they called Federal Espresso. It placed them squarely among early Upstate pioneers in offering the style and feel of neighborhood coffee shops that are so familiar today.
The new owners started off with a legendary Pearl Street location, near the Columbus Bakery. While Anna and John have this sentimental Yuletide memory of providing hot chocolate on a cold December day to all the people standing in line for Columbus bread, Federal Express wasn’t feeling those kindly sentiments about the name above the door.
The national shipping titan went to court, alleging this little Syracuse coffee outfit was infringing on the corporate trademark. In 1997, Heath said, an agreement was reached between the two sides to change that name within 90 days.
As Anna said the other day: “We didn’t say to what.”
The new choice: Ex-Federal Espresso.
The dispute attracted widespread attention, especially when a we-are-not-amused Federal Express again tried to bring the legal hammer down, hard. At the beginning, in the mid-1990s, Heath thought everything could be resolved with a few reasonable and well-crafted letters. Instead, he found himself making arguments before federal judges while a mountain of paperwork built up in his office.
The result was a final agreement in 2000, after Heath had twice won in court — but Federal Express indicated it was going to appeal once again. The shop’s owners embraced a distinctive new name, which Anna said was inspired by a little headline that an editor at the Syracuse Newspapers used above a letter written about their case for the opinion page:
Freedom of Espresso.
While their Pearl Street and Armory Square shops have closed, Freedom continues to operate at Solar Street and in Liverpool, Camillus and Fayetteville. The owners still make baked goods (a columnist’s admission: After running along the Creekwalk, I often stop by for molasses cookies hauntingly similar to ones my Scottish mother used to make) and they still provide coffee for such outlets as Syracuse University, Drumlins, Alto Cinco and more.
Years ago, the owners thanked Heath — who remains a customer — by naming one of their specialty-roasted blends after him, and Heath told the audience last week how the name of the shop is a prominent reminder of an ethic he holds dear:
“As we used to say in the ‘70s,” Heath said, “freedom is a constant struggle.”
The ceremony included a proclamation by Mayor Ben Walsh of “Freedom of Espresso Day” in Syracuse. Walsh noted he’s a longtime patron: He and his friend Rob Simpson, president of CenterState CEO, have been meeting for weekly coffee at the Solar Street shop for many years.
Some of his earliest conversations about running for mayor happened at a corner table almost a decade ago, said Walsh, who’ll leave office — the city has a two-term mayoral limit — within a few weeks.
Simpson also spoke, describing how much his son Ben has felt at home in the Freedom shops since the child toddled. While Simpson praised the larger sense of warmth and sanctuary John and Anna Dobbs provide, his central point focused on hard numbers:
Statistically, he said, only about 5 percent of American small businesses survive after 30 years — a daunting figure he mentioned to applause during this celebration of a family coffee operation that’s not only achieved that longshot threshold but goes on, doing just fine.
I spoke over the last few days with such longtime customers as Marc Adler, a Syracuse businessman who went to Nottingham High with Anna and has been a regular almost since the beginning — to the point where he has a wooden chair at Solar Street with his name marked on the back.
The most important quality, to Adler, is the enduring connection made with the wildly varied mix of people passing through the door. Freedom’s, he noted, is where he became close friends-for-life with such new acquaintances as former city public works commissioner Tony Ilacqua and the late Richard Hawks, chair of landscape architecture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“It was a coffee shop in the purest sense,” Ilacqua said of the original Pearl Street operation, which arrived at a time when such an approach was still new to Syracuse.
In a way that reminds me of the gut sensibilities of John Stage of the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, or the late Peter Coleman of Tipperary Hill, Anna Dobbs also has an intuitive sense about design, about meshing a business with a neighborhood space in a way that benefits and lifts up both.
Wherever they go, Anna said Freedom’s approach always “capitalized on what the buildings afforded us” — a realization that felt especially powerful in the 1990s, after decades of property owners who used phony and suffocating ornamentation to destroy or hide the character of city landmarks.
Beth Crawford, a longtime voice for preservation in the region, became a regular at the Armory Square Freedom’s coffee shop. I’d see Crawford there on many mornings, reading the paper at a table in the center of the place, and her daughter Rachel was a Freedom’s barista for years.
“They picked unique locations that had really good traffic, unique locations where people could meet and gather,” Crawford said. The owners packaged that sense of community as a form of good business with what Crawford called a “woody, well-lighted vibe.”
Wrapped together?
It was their 20th century gateway to still being here, in 2025.
By chance, the gathering was held three days before the funeral services for Charlotte “Chuckie” Holstein, the indomitable Central New York civic advocate who co-founded FOCUS Greater Syracuse and Leadership Greater Syracuse and died earlier this month, at 100.
I thought of Holstein, and the way she saw Syracuse, as I left the coffee shop. She and Anna were friends. They met through an intermediary when Holstein and her late husband Alex journeyed to Alaska years ago, and the couples went out together for dinner. The Holsteins bought a sculpture from John’s studio, cementing a bond that held strong for decades, which is why Anna was there for Holstein’s funeral service.
At the heart of it was a shared understanding expressed as much in actions and strategy, as in words.
Holstein arrived in Syracuse in 1946, in time to experience the city at its postwar industrial peak, not so long before the region slipped into what became more than a half-century of economic decline. In 2007, during a conversation with Holstein when I was a columnist for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, she made a point I never forget.
Like so many Upstate communities, Holstein said, it felt as if greater Syracuse all too often collectively went “looking for a Moses” — a company or a magical leader that would singlehandedly return the city to an era of vitality and fraternity and prosperity that, honestly, never truly existed in such a way in the first place.
Moses isn’t coming, Holstein said — or maybe he’s waiting inside each of us. Her relentless message is true even amid all these feverish dreams about Micron:
A community changes in foundational and palpable fashion when the people who love it most recognize its strengths and look honestly at its failings, work hard at the most elemental of person-to-person relationships to build intimate and powerful community alliances and then attempt to create visionary motion through tireless diligence and commitment in lasting ways, on the ground.
A pro beano observation: After all these years, that’s Freedom.
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