Baby’s on Fire owners speak out on sudden closure, say they received death threats

Former Baby’s on Fire owners David Koslowski and Shirlé Hale Koslowski spoke out Thursday for the first time about their decision to close their popular Mount Vernon café.

The couple shut down the coffee shop and record store last month, citing ongoing financial problems. But staff said they believed the closure was a response to employees’ attempts to unionize with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27.

The labor group’s president, Jason Chorpenning, called the shop’s shutdown “union-busting 101.” Influencer and former political candidate Bobby LaPin made a video about the workers’ last day.

Through it all, the Koslowskis, who live in Portugal, largely kept quiet. But they wrote an open letter on social media this week meant to show that the business faced problems long before the unionization push.

“Baby’s never made a profit in its ten-year history,” they wrote in the letter, which was released by spokesperson Samantha Waranch of the Baltimore-based C-360 Agency. “Not once.” But the financial situation grew even worse in the past two years, the couple said in a phone call, with a drastic decline in sales that they attributed to broader economic conditions and layoffs in the federal government.

Since announcing the closure, the couple has been dealing with the ongoing work of shutting down the café from an ocean away. “Closing down a business is about as hard as opening up a business,” David Koslowski said. There’s a mountain of paperwork, along with the physical property and equipment to sell or get rid of.

More painful is backlash and even vitriol from the community. In the aftermath of the announcement, Shirlé Hale Koslowski said, “We received three death threats emailed to us and countless emails.” David Koslowski called the situation “beyond a nightmare.”

According to a timeline Waranch provided to The Banner, the couple had met with lawyers to discuss the possibility of selling Baby’s, and even explored the idea of offering their employees the right of first refusal. But in June, workers sent the Koslowskis a letter of intent to organize a union. The owners said their own attorneys urged them to stay silent on the matter.

Meanwhile, the business was running out of money, and the Koslowskis said they independently realized that they would need to shut down. The decision “had nothing to do with the union,” David Koslowski said. “You can’t get blood from a stone.” They hadn’t paid themselves in months, they said, and had spent their retirement funds trying to keep the business afloat. Ultimately, the business served its last customers on July 19.

Two days before that, the National Labor Relations Board confirmed that the union petition had been withdrawn. “With that process now concluded, David and Shirlé felt they could finally speak publicly and share the documentation and timeline surrounding the business’s closure,” Waranch wrote.

Whether the statement will change minds remains to be seen. The Baby’s on Fire Workers United group said on Instagram Stories late Thursday afternoon that they were aware of the statement from ownership but that “they blocked us all and this worker IG and have turned comments off which shows a lot, but remains in line with how they have moved at every turn.” The group said they are “focused on next steps.”

The Koslowskis’ three-page letter also responded to employees’ claims that the couple had been hard to reach. They said they had relocated to Portugal after David Koslowski was diagnosed with skin cancer, in part because the country has lower health care costs.

“We were actively in communication with the staff, sometimes daily but mostly weekly, via phone calls, texts and our chat group,” wrote the Koslowskis, who said they were still involved in the “day-to-day operation” of Baby’s on Fire after they relocated. “Any period of reduced communication was due to legal guidance we received. We have never been through something like this before and felt overwhelmed.”

A spokesperson for the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy said last month that the organization, which helps businesses transition to a worker-owned model, reached out to the Koslowskis but had not heard back.

The Koslowskis said in an interview that they were not interested in selling the business after its closure. They also do not own the building where the café operated, which is listed for sale online. “It’s time to move on,” David Koslowski said.

Though they were proud of what they’d achieved with Baby’s on Fire, which became a haven for members of Baltimore’s LGBTQIA+ community and unhoused residents, “it didn’t end in a pretty way,” David Koslowski said. “Life isn’t pretty all the time.”