Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Cool cafe’s hip feel is no Enigma

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, May 8, 1998 | 9:34 a.m.

ENIGMA GARDEN Cafe is a dream of metropolitan cool, a figment of cosmopolitan culture. "It's a fantasy of urbanity," says co-owner Lenadams Dorris, lighting a cigarette at a painted table in Engima's tiny art gallery. "Real urbanity is gritty and ugly."

Thanks largely to that cafe-culture sensibility -- the appealing notion of fascinating people in brainy engagement, scattering sharp bons mots between sips of fancy coffee -- Enigma this month is celebrating its fifth anniversary as a mainstay of downtown hip. (Events are planned through May.)

Filled with plant life, its umbrellaed tables squeezed onto a courtyard between pleasantly old buildings, Enigma is an ideal "third place," urban-planning parlance for a neutral corner away from home and work. It's a quiet, green haven for those frazzled by Vegas, a human bulletin board of "interesting people you wouldn't meet sitting in Denny's," Dorris says.

Thanks to years of hosting local musicians and poetry readings, Enigma is also ground zero for the downtown scene, site of the first scorch marks of the neighborhood's current cultural explosion. Yes, there were other things going on -- a few, scattered whatevers -- but downtown's current arts activity owes a lot to the spirit that coalesced on Enigma's Fourth Street patio.

"I'd like to take credit for a little of that, sure," says original founder and co-owner Julie Brewer. "When I started, there was no talk of revitalization. Fourth Street was a no-man's zone of prostitutes and crackheads."

Enigma is as organic as its plants; it grew on its own. "I didn't have anything in mind when I started," says Brewer. She just loved the property -- "it spoke to me," she recalls. "I felt at home. I signed the lease that day. Looking back, it was probably kinda stupid."

More than an example of how a small, grass-roots labor of love can have rippling effects -- it's hard to imagine downtown culture without it, or something exactly like it -- Enigma also stands as a modest rebuke to Strip Mall America. Try to imagine it in a storefront next to Vons ... eewww! Other coffeehouses have come and gone -- Cafe Nero and Cyber City Cafe recently -- but Enigma's funky individuality lends it staying power.

"Enigma is a very specific place on the planet," Dorris says. "The buildings seem to rise from this earth. That's the underlying aesthetic, the earth-rootedness of it."

Brewer and Dorris see Enigma as a "healing place." "This is a safe place, where people slowly, surely drop their defenses," he says. "We see people come in, they've just moved here and have been assaulted by Vegas, they've found it a hard, cold city. They come here and the walls begin to drop." For even more healing, the Enigmen and women have taken to planting wildflowers on surrounding properties.

Wait -- put the harmonic convergence on hold and call a plumber! For a healing place, Enigma has plenty of aches and pains. "A water line we didn't even know we had anymore burst last night," he says. "It was a mess, thousands of gallons of water ..." They've spent $4,000 on plumbing this year, money that comes in by the coffee cup going out by the gallon.

Oh, well. "It's not here for us to retire on," Dorris says. "It's here so art and music and beauty can flourish." Says Brewer, "We sell food and drink so we can do the rest of it."