Park Slope Coffee Shop Takes Down 'Peeping Tom' Bathroom Sign

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — A new Park Slope coffee shop has removed a bathroom sign that some people said promoted "rape culture."

The sign, on the front of the single bathroom at Clever Blend on Fifth Avenue and Park Place, showed a man climbing on a bathroom stall to peak at the woman on the other side.

The coffee shop opened in early April, but social media uproar over the sign didn't start until a few days ago. Since then, the shop's Instagram and Yelp pages have been overrun with comments — mostly negative — about the sign.

Owner Luca Tesconi told Patch the sign was supposed to be harmless. Finishing up a 90-day renovation, after taking the space over from Gorilla Coffee, Tesconi said he googled "funny bathroom signs" and found the one above for $12.99.

"We didn’t put much thought into it," Tesconi, who also runs Triple Shot World Atlas Cafe in Long Island City and the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, told Patch.

No one complained about the sign at first, he said.

"We opened April 8. Do you know how many women come in? It’s mostly women and their babies. Nobody ever said anything," Tesconi remembers.

Until one day. As Tesconi remembers it, a girl came out of the bathroom and approached him.

"And she goes 'by the way, we are out of soap, and we are out of touch,'" he said she told him. "'Your sign is very offensive.'"

Then she tweeted it out to her "17,000 followers" and the rest was history, he said. And the backlash was swift.

"I prefer my coffee free from rape culture," Yelp user Liza E. from Brooklyn wrote. "Even if they take down that appalling sign their pathetic, bro-y response and complete inability to self crit means I never want to give them another cent. Grow up and join this century; you've lost this customer forever."

Tesconi didn't take the sign down right away. First, he went into defense mode, suggesting the girl was actually angry about the shop's strict laptop usage rules.

"I'm having a hard time making sense of this," he wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post. "We bought a funny sign (this is the way it is advertised on Amazon and EBay-why don't you curse at Jeff Bezos now?) and we get a "FU@% YOU" compilation, plus a couple of "bad" Yelp reviews because a "Laptop customer" decides to translate an innocent stupid sign into a personal vendetta probably because she didn't like our laptops rules."

Then, he posted a "referendum" on a piece of paper outside of the bathroom, with a pen tied to the sign. It asked whether the sign was "just a silly sign" or "promotes violence" and had boxes for people to vote for each answer.

Even though "just a silly sign" won out, Tesconi said, he ended up taking it down.

"The simple truth is that we honestly didn’t hang that sign with the intention of offending anyone," Clever Blend wrote in an Instagram apology. "As we told the handful of news reporters that inquired about the incident, we now understand that even when you try your best you can’t nail it every time."

In its place, Tesconi hung a makeshift "inclusive restroom" sign printed out on a piece of paper. A real one is on its way.

Tesconi doesn't believe the outrage was as big as people made it out to be. He also said business wasn't affected: "It didn’t go up or go down. It stayed the same."

And he concedes that the people speaking out may have been victims of assault themselves.

"It’s just a few. But maybe the few had something happen to them," he said. "It’s like you say, 'I’m not going to get hit by lightning.' But 50 people around the world are going to."

Tesconi doesn't live in the neighborhood; he lives in Long Island City. He also doesn't believe the backlash had anything to do with the liberal leanings of most of his customer base.

But when sign-gate was in full swing, he remembers someone coming in and telling him: "Welcome to Park Slope."