The original Muddy Waters Coffee House, which has sat near the corner of 16th and Valencia streets for 34 years, is up for sale for $75,000, according to a Craigslist listing posted earlier this month.
“Lots of potential, popular cafe with locals and tourists … business owners ready to retire,” reads the listing, which also noted a prime location on Valencia Street with “heavy foot traffic.”
The owners’ daughter confirmed the sale, but said she was not sure why her parents were selling the cafe at 521 Valencia St. The coffee shop’s owners, Hisham and Elham Massarweh, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Najat Echchoukairi, who has worked at the cafe for 20 years, said she did not know about the sale. She said she could not speak for the owners, but that she wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to sell the business.
In an interview with Mission Local in December, Echchoukairi said she feared the owners would be forced to close because the business had slowed considerably.
Muddy Waters relied on construction workers who would drive by, park, get their coffee and be on their way, she said. But the parking spaces outside of the cafe are now reserved only for six-wheeled delivery vehicles.
On Thursday at around noon, only one person was sitting in the cafe. Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and a copy of Sunday’s New York Times sat on the bookshelf near the register, unread.
Muddy Waters used to be a community hub for discussion of politics, poetry and issues that affected San Francisco in the ’90s, cafe co-owner Hisham Massarweh said in a 2018 interview. That changed around the time of the recession in 2008, Echchoukairi said, when the regulars stopped coming.
The new customers, she said at the time, “don’t even talk to me to ask how I am. They just ask for their coffee. They are in their own world.”
But at the time she still tried to make the place a community space it once was, striking up conversations with new and old customers alike. When a customer was short a few dollars or could not afford their coffee, she told them they could pay later.
Muddy Waters suffered an ATM theft last year, after which the coffee shop had to move its ATM away from the entrance to the back of the store.
The Massarwehs closed the cafe’s other location near the corner of 24th and Valencia streets in 2021 after 27 years on the site, due to a failed rent negotiation. That cafe remains empty.
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January 26, 2024 at 08:01AM
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Muddy Waters Coffee House at Valencia and 16th for sale for $75K - Mission Local
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