Closing Statement to the Public

November 21st, 2025
My name is Ashley Cake, and I have owned and operated the Watershed since 2016 and the Downstairs since 2020. It is with a full and heavy heart that I am announcing our closure at the end of the year. Tuesday, December 23rd will be our last night.

To our beloved regulars, however far flung, I hope you are able to make it in as much as possible and enjoy these spaces that you helped us build. For those of you who have had gift cards since our Consumer Supported Hospitality campaign in 2016, your cards are still here. Please come collect. Your enduring support has meant the world to me and to my staff. For those of you who are really about the drinks, get in touch because Rachel is preparing a special book edition of our 176 page Cocktail Directory so you can enjoy your Pomp & Lavenders, Autumn Manhattans, and Watershed Sidecars in perpetuity.

After nine years of running the most beautiful “bar” I have ever experienced in my life, I want to take this opportunity to tell some percentage of the story as to why I ran the Watershed & the Downstairs the way I did, and why we are closing at this particular time.

I have been serving Ithacans as a cashier, barista, and bartender since 1994, and the whole truth is that the Watershed arose out of the millions of conversations I’ve had over the years with my coworkers, customers, bosses, organizers, and everyday people. Over and over again what I heard was that folks wanted to connect with each other and be a part of a community. Even in the ten minute interactions at the grocery store or the coffeeshop, people were invested in finding relationships – recognition and familiarity – in that third space that is neither work nor home. So when it finally came time to open my own place, conversational atmosphere wasn’t just a well-researched point of difference in my business plan, it was the core operating principle of the Watershed’s hospitality ethic.

All these years later, folks still struggle to put their finger on what it is that is so special about the Watershed. I remind people that it’s not about the excellent drinks, or the beautiful building, or Trade Design Build’s award-winning renovation. It’s about the notes in the walls; it’s being able to hear your own thoughts as you’re reading a book; it’s sitting across from your best friend telling you something they haven’t had a chance to because you’re both so busy. Conversational atmosphere is the reason why the Watershed is the date spot, and why dozens of marriages and organizations and partnerships have started there. When I opened the Watershed I was crossing my fingers that Ithacans were ready to fall in love with each other, and it is beautiful for all of us that I was right.

Despite my years in training for an academic career, service work and bartending in particular always paid my bills. So I started the Watershed as a bar to create good paying jobs in a troubled industry; a workplace that operates under the principle that labor creates all value. Certifying as a Living Wage Employer was an obvious first step, and we were the first bar in Tompkins County to do so. In 2016, the Tompkins County Living Wage was $15/hour, and given the Watershed’s instant success, it was easy to guarantee that to our tipped and non-tipped employees alike. Being responsible to our workforce has always meant understanding and compensating as much as possible for the ups and downs of the hospitality industry in Ithaca’s highly seasonal service economy.

However much I have struggled with these issues as an individual wage-earner and employer, there have always been larger issues at stake. Being a business owner gave me a platform to participate in some of the civic organizations that touch our lives downtown. In this capacity I joined the Downtown Ithaca Alliance board and served as secretary and then chair, completing my second term in 2023. During my time on the board, I assembled a 30 member Night Economy Committee composed of bartenders, servers, social workers, venue owners, and residents.

With the support of our DIA board and Tom Knipe with the city Office of Economic Development, we were well on our way to organizing for public bathrooms, no-to-low-barrier hospitality including food and places to rest, volunteer outreach workers, bystander intervention trainings and other alternatives to police intervention. The de-escalation and public safety work all of us service workers in the night economy had been doing for decades was being recognized and help was on the way.

Enter the pandemic.

The ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis has shown the widening gaps in our social safety net and tossed wage earners into uncertainty if not destitution. The hospitality industry was decimated. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of cooks, dishwashers, servers, and bartenders lost their income, their health, and their lives. It was not safe to gather in numbers for nearly three years, and the Watershed missed out on at least two years of introductions to the new cohort of undergraduate and graduate students who make up a significant portion of our sales during the school year.

As for the locals, everyone’s habits changed. Fewer people drink alcohol these days, for lots of good reasons; late night never came back; folks can’t afford more than one night out a week, if that; a lot of Ithacans sold their houses during the pandemic cash rush and now live outside the city. To give examples from my own life, for more than 15 years I got a quad soy latte at Gimme! nearly every day, and not just when I worked there. Prior to the pandemic, I would be in Asia Cuisine three times a week. Now I treat myself once a month or so. I miss all those delicacies and everyday relationships, I simply cannot afford my old routines.

For those reasons and others, I instituted the 20% Bartender Commission on sales in 2021 to keep us a certifiably living wage employer. With the Bartender Commission, I wanted to address more explicitly the vulnerabilities that the pandemic laid bare for all of us in the service industry, as well as to remember out loud the racist and exploitative history of tipping – “gratuitous” compensation – in the United States. Many of the people coming in around that time were tourists or white-collar salaried folk with a per diem who were less interested in the particular magic of Ithaca or the Watershed than in getting exactly what they wanted and paying next to nothing for their time- and energy-consuming service.

As the cost of living skyrockets and wages stagnate or decline along with revenue, the service of luxury commodities exacerbates a two-tier system with laborers below the line supporting the consumers up top. I joke sometimes that bartenders and servers wear black because we’re like stagehands, we make it all happen but we’re not supposed to be seen or heard. That lack of care for service industry workers and the folks who are most vulnerable in these industries has been heartbreakling to witness. While folks who still can are enjoying their amenities, the people who support their very lives in all material aspects are under siege. I don’t see a trajectory of recovery for my business as long as that is the case.

The Living Wage for Tompkins County is now $24.82 an hour, more than $4 more than the highest wage I can afford to pay for untipped work. Only bartenders make more than that, and as of 2025, I am no longer able to certify as a Living Wage Employer.

Meanwhile, the alcohol-based night life and live entertainment industries are collapsing all around us. My friends in retail and production tell me they’re nearly 40% down in some categories. National distributors are buckling and selling off their portfolios to the megacorps. Smaller distributors are juggling high turnover, frequent back-orders, and price hikes from producers and whole delivery schedules are being cut. The minimums and fuel surcharges keep rising.

The impacts of the collapse of these industries is not limited to workers, owners, and producers. There are whole informal economies that subsist on the margins of the beverage business. Here in Ithaca, all the bottle deposit redemption centers have closed in the last few years. Folks who make their living that way are at the mercy of the automated machines at chain grocery stores, sometimes far away in commercial parks. Even Wegman’s, a consistently top employer, no longer staffs a human being to assist the public in getting their deposits. Resourceful, resilient people are being deprived of their meager living and as a community we are approving that state of affairs with our avoidance of the issue and denial of our power to address it. As James Baldwin observes, “We have yet to understand that if I am starving, you are in danger.”

Meanwhile, and for a long time, the Police Benevolent Association and Cornell have been scaremongering about panhandling and drug use on the Commons. Our central pedestrian mall has been renovated into an inhospitable surveillance zone where folks without money to spend in the shops are not welcome. The focus on attracting monied consumers has exacerbated the systemic inequity which reduces people’s circumstances to availing themselves of nominally “public” infrastructure that is hostile to them. The abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this “organized abandonment.”

The very few Community Outreach Workers and social service providers tasked with connecting people with resources are underpaid, overtasked, and have a limited ability to meet the growing needs of our most vulnerable residents and neighbors. Meanwhile, in the most recent city budget, the handful of unarmed responders approved in the legislative session have not been funded, while a dozen funded IPD positions remain persistently vacant.

The huge city-wide Reimagining Public Safety effort came to many of the same conclusions as our DIA Night Economy Committee before the pandemic. In 2021 I also served on a task force for the 300 block of West MLK Street with human services professionals from STAP and the Continuum of Care, IURA, and Common Council, and our recommendations were the same: 1) Public bathrooms, including showers and laundromats, 2) Low barrier, accessible spaces including no cost access to food and services, 3) Unarmed responders and alternatives to police intervention.

These three recommendations among others have been put forward again and again by different agencies and individuals in the city and the county. Studies have been done and exhibited that show the evidence-based success of these services and community practices, and yet in 2025 the preponderance of completed development has been for the very wealthy. We have more housing for the wealthy than ever before. Restaurants and bars that cater to a wealthy clientele are getting by, while longstanding establishments for working class people – like Shortstop, Royale Court, Kelley’s Dockside, and the Chanticleer – are struggling or closing, not least because their customer base and workforce has been impoverished and displaced.

Downtown, closing venues like the Range and Silky Jones means fewer businesses being open after 10pm, which means fewer usable bathrooms and still zero public facilities. Fewer service industry workers keeping their jobs or making ends meet enough to go out after work means the loss of a significant stabilizing social presence downtown, not to mention the loss of a large customer base for the Watershed and the Downstairs. All the way on the West side of the Commons, my business is left appealing to the well-heeled folks who still have so many places to choose from.

Meanwhile, Cornell continues to damage the social and economic relationships that we rely upon as a community. Most recently they have harmed folks with their union-busting, university-wide budget cuts, lay offs, and continuing capitulation to the administration’s craven demands, ostensibly in order to protect their capital interests. Even more outrageous, Cornell’s exemplary persecutions of students who protest the state of Israel’s genocide in Palestine have set such an atmosphere of apprehension that many of the international graduate students who were our regular customers left Ithaca in May.

A lot of people ask me what the number is, how much money would it take to keep the spaces open. One of my bartenders said it perfectly: It’s not about the money, we need customers. What my places need to flourish is nothing less than our collective liberation. I need folks to have childcare, stable housing, basic income, health care, good fresh food. We need public bathrooms, places where people can gather spontaneously, services that are accountable to the communities they serve, and systems of care that are built on reciprocal relationships.

After 9 years in business I can no longer afford this community’s decades-long divestment from affordability. The people I serve are being abandoned and communities that I am accountable to are under siege. While this city, this county, this state, and this country continues to fail the people so utterly, I can no longer justify tying up my skills, resources, and connections in a single building, hustling commodities for the luxury class. Care is the only thing that has ever transformed circumstances and people, in that order. In this very serious moment, I need to get back to doing what I care about the most: Making sure that the people around me have what they need to be free. I believe with Eugene Debs that while there is a soul imprisoned, I am not free.

Thank you for loving the Watershed and the Downstairs with me all these years. I’m so glad we got to do this beautiful thing together. Ithacans, I’m sure I will see you soon.

Ashley Cake

Ashley Cake Public Statements

DIA Annual Dinner Talk on the Founding of the Watershed, March 13th, 2017

DIA Talk Final.pdf

Tompkins County Restaurant Owner’s Manual Introduction, 2018

RestaurantManualDigital6_11_19.pdf

Living Wage Panel Presentation, May 2019

Living Wage Panel Pres 2019.pdf

Stamping Harriet Tubman on the $20 at the Watershed, Interview with Jimmy Jordan for WRFI, August 2019

Downtown Strategic Plan Presentation (Tom Knipe) with Input from DIA Night Economy Committee, January 2020

Presentation-Simple_Nighttime with recorded feedback_1-24-20.pdf

Statement in Solidarity with the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020

Statement in Solidarity with the George Floyd Uprisings, June 3rd, 2020 - Google Docs.pdf

Birthday Bash Speech on the Founding of the Downstairs, March 2023

Downstairs Birthday Speech (2).pdf

Statement on the Ceasefire Resolution before Common Council, March 2024.

Ceasefire Resolution, Ithaca Common Council.pdf

Open Letter to DIA Board regarding retailers and Asteri residents, June 2024

Downtown work June 2024.pdf