I was born in Sheboygan, the youngest of five. We lived on a farm just north of town where my folks grew pumpkins and a bit of everything else.
Kate Krause | Sheboygan, WI
When I was in fifth grade, my dad bought his own funeral home in Omro, so I went to middle school and high school living in an apartment above the business. Sadly, my father passed away when I was fifteen, and then my mother sold the funeral home and moved us back to Sheboygan once I had graduated.
I went to UW-Sheboygan, but I wasn’t a good student. I was wildly distracted, met my first girlfriend, and did anything but study. I was working in other coffee shops when a big space that had once been a coffee shop became available, and I very much decided to start my business on a whim. I was like, ‘Should I try this? I think we could do this.’ My mom said, ‘Go ahead and quit school, but make sure you’re in good standing so you can go back.’ So I did. She is a big proponent of options. I had bought a house and really wanted to live in Sheboygan because I love the lake and this whole area, so I decided to go for it.
I wanted to help make Sheboygan a place where my friends and I wanted to live. We went to a lot of shows in Milwaukee, so that gave me the idea to turn the space into a music venue. That’s how Paradigm Coffee and Music started. We held our first show in 2006, but we didn’t know what we were doing. We borrowed a sound system. The wood stain on the stage was still wet. We charged five bucks at the door, had two local bands and a band out of Sweden, and handed out LaCroix from a little cooler behind the makeshift counter. We didn’t even have furniture, everybody just sat on the floor. It was a great time.
I come from a long line of people who have small businesses. It’s just ingrained in me. Both of my mom’s parents were beauticians who had their own beauty parlor, and my uncle also started a beauty school. On my dad’s side, my aunt ran a tavern with a dance hall attached to it, and my uncle owned the grocery store in Mishicot. My folks had their farm and my dad ran the funeral home, my sister owned a pizza place where I worked as a teenager. So to me, starting a business seemed natural.
In the beginning, we could only pay musicians in tips and a place to stay. Acts would come through, and I let them stay in my house. We just figured it out and continued to learn from everyone who passed through.
The apartment above the venue became available and the landlord put us in charge of renting it out because we were so loud. We were charged $375 per month, which was wild. A friend of ours made one bedroom upstairs into a sound booth and he recorded an album up there. We furnished the whole apartment and called it a musicians hostel.
We kept evolving and rolling and eventually added food service to our space just to pay the bills. The building already had all of the appropriate plumbing for the kitchen, so that worked out well. But what was great about those early days is that we were forming community and making space for art, music, queer people, and other like-minded folks. We moved out of that space in 2009 and still sometimes refer to our current space as the new shop.
We’ve done a lot of weird things over the years. For instance, we moved into our new shop with a 110 person bucket-brigade. At one point, most of my staff lived in my house as well because we couldn’t pay very well, but housing was something I could provide. Sometimes we had John Michale Kohler Arts Center interns and Lakeland University students living with us. It was like a housing co-op before we even had the language to describe that. I joke that the only reason it worked out was because none of us are earth signs, which meant we all just floated around each other.
Shortly after moving to our new space, we launched Sheboygan’s first and only food co-op in the back of our building, then later moved it across the street. In the beginning, if we didn’t have a volunteer back in the co-op, we would put a note on the register that said, ‘Yell over for us,’ and we would have to run back and forth.
Any time opportunities popped up, we just kept pivoting and figuring it out. There was no grand plan, but it has all been a fun journey that has expanded into a great community of businesses here in Sheboygan. It was all very fun—very difficult, but fun. A lot of times it felt like we were just in survival mode, figuring out what needs we could fill and where, but we managed.
During the pandemic, Paradigm closed for four and a half months. Even though we were closed, we managed to put on a couple of pop-ups and were happy that the community really showed up for us.
We sold muffins and growlers of cold press out the window and managed to pay our rent. Three of us kept the co-op open during that time. We did a ton of curbside pickup and grocery shopping for people. For a lot of people, we were their only connection to the wider world, which was very important. We witnessed a lot of people’s absentee ballots. If we hadn’t had fifteen years of creating community under our belts at that time, I don’t know if we would have been able to do it.
We closed the co-op after the pandemic, but recently, one of my very first employees at Paradigm opened her own shop in that space. It’s called City Vintage and Thrift and features mostly vintage clothing. Once a month she hosts a Community Free-Store. Any time a new shop opens in the neighborhood, we encourage our new neighbors. We like to support local folks and anybody else trying to do good things. When we first opened, there wasn’t much happening in these two blocks, but now there’s quite a lot going on.
For instance, we have a place on our block called Green Bicycle Company, which is like a sustainable living, and bicycle shop run by Heather Cleveland, an urban planner/civil engineer, which is awesome. I work with Heather, Braden Schmidt and a bunch of others on Sheboygan Active Transportation. We advocate for safe biking, complete streets, organize a bike week, critical mass rides, bike-in-movie nights, a little bike expo, and other things.
When I talk about ‘we’ as in, ‘we opened a food co-op,’ I’m using a ‘royal we.’ Sometimes it’s just me and my team, but it’s also a lot of community members. I have one employee who has been with me since day one, and another who has been here for over ten years. Now I also have a full-time marketing person, as well as a sound guy, so we’re like a whole team. So it’s a collective, but we are not always the same people.
In the eighteen years we have been open in Sheboygan, the city has grown a lot. We’ve become a bit of a tourist spot now, which wasn’t the case when we first opened. In fact, we completely renamed our neighborhood about ten or fifteen years ago. In the early days, based on the way the city lines were drawn, anything south of the main road into the city was called downtown. We are just one block north of that road, so we said, ‘Well if we’re not downtown, we must be uptown.’
The area with our businesses has grown to more than a couple of blocks now, and the name has spread. The senior center moved into our neighborhood and rebranded as Uptown Social, and then a friend of ours started a pizza place called Uptown Slice. There are quite a few businesses around us, and we all get along. The city is even letting us close off the street between our building and the bar across the street from any traffic so we can have a pedestrian-only space, The Uptown Parklet, something we first did during the pandemic.
Generally speaking, we are wildly supported within the community we have built. I think one of our biggest successes is that we’re intergenerational. We get customers of all ages at all times, even though we have all these radical posters up by the door. One of them says, ‘Here, there will always be consequences for racist behavior. Bigots walk. Don’t come back.’ We have lost a couple of customers because of that, which I thought was super telling. It’s important to me that younger folks can come into Paradigm and see the representation of queer people behind the counter and hanging out and all the “radical” ideals we post around through art and posters and then look around and see folks in their seventies and eighties having coffee. That passive acceptance is the work.
I started Paradigm when I was 23, I’m 41 now and I’ve seen a lot of people and businesses come and go. Sheboygan has changed so much from the time we opened to now. People come up from Chicago to stay at the resort or at Kohler, or wherever, and then they discover Sheboygan. People are often surprised by this gem. Years ago, a friend of mine who came here as an intern and never left said ‘Sheboygan, who knew?’ And so we turned that into a logo, put it on a T-shirt, and we still sell it.
I have always considered Sheboygan my home. One reason I opened Paradigm–and worked hard to keep it open –is because we needed an open space that welcomed the Queer community. The community we’ve built is a small bubble within a much larger population that is not supportive of the LGBTQ+ community.
I think I come from a generation that’s very jumpy. I’m all about safety first. Even just the other day, my girlfriend and I were walking our dog when this car with tinted windows pulled up too fast. There was a guy in the car with his windows halfway down, and he waved us forward. I was like, ‘I don’t walk in front of cars like that while holding hands with my girlfriend.’ And I have to ask, am I just paranoid, or are these learned responses? I don’t know. I just know I trust my instincts. In that moment, my gut told me not to walk in front of that car. I’m not always comfortable around people I don’t know. I mean, being queer or out wasn’t even an option when I was in high school.
Those feelings aren’t unjustified, especially since we have had some real issues with harassment at Paradigm. Being gay and having Tammy Baldwin,, pro-immigration signs up certainly offend people constantly. We keep a couple facing out so people know what kind of space they’re walking into. But I’ve also adopted a zero-interaction policy when it comes to online comments, whether good, bad, or indifferent. We learned that the hard way after we got severely harassed by some gun fanatics right after the shooting in Orlando, FL that killed 49 people at a gay nightclub. They called us ‘sitting ducks’ and said we were the next Orlando. I ended up calling the police, but they weren’t super helpful because the threats were not direct enough. To me, people standing outside across the street with AK-47s strapped across their chest is pretty direct, but there you go. I’m a farm kid, I’m not someone who is afraid of guns, but I don’t think you need them to go get coffee.
Those same folks started leaving one-star reviews on every online platform they could find. They wrote terrible things about us. A lot of people wanted to help us, but we requested that nobody interact with them in person or online, but if they wanted to help, they could leave us good reviews. The next morning, I woke up to 275 five-star reviews, which was awesome. We got help from people all over.
Around that same time we started Queer Potluck. A quarterly potluck where we put all the tables together and share a meal together for a couple of hours. It’s a good chance to see each other, humanize and exist together, support each other and just know each other. The event was inspired by a gay potluck that existed in a church basement when I first moved back here as a teenager.
My interest has always been in supporting people, building community, and building bridges. In fact, I have coffee a few times a week with a pretty conservative man in his sixties. We connected with each other and he has been my regular customer since I was a twenty-year-old working in my first coffee shop. We have supported each other, planted seeds of understanding, and become friends. And I know that us caring about each other has affected both of us positively. So it’s all about the long game, building safe spaces for future generations.
To that end, I’m one of the founders and co-chairs of the Sheboygan County LGBTQ Alliance. We teamed up with Mental Health of America to organize. At our first-ever meeting, we invited the sheriff, police department, and other community officials and stakeholders. We gave a presentation that basically said, ‘This stuff is really important.’ We’re now an official 501c3 through a national organization called SEE, Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs. We organize the Sheboygan Pride Picnic, represent and advocate in various circles, and have monthly meetings. The Alliance has representation from the Boys and Girls Club, Mental Health of America, Lakeshore Community Health, The Autism Society of America, Sheboygan Area School District, and a lot of other organizations.
Paradigm has been around long enough that in the beginning, a lot of our touring musicians from big cities would say, It’s unnecessary to have these queer-only spaces because we’re so accepted and it’s so normal.’ And things have changed, it feels like the rug got pulled out from under us. And so over the last few years, this space has felt really necessary.
Despite the challenges we have had here, I still want to be in Sheboygan. Sheboygan has grown, I no longer know every queer person that exists in this city, which is a big change. It’s a good community. The support that our small businesses give each other is awesome. We keep an eye out for each other and have each other’s backs. Plus, even though it might have been easier to go somewhere where safer communities already existed, I think it’s important for us to build that here.
Kate’s story was produced by Alexandria Delcourt. You can learn more about Paradigm here.
Love Wisconsin’s Sheboygan Story Series features stories of four people from different parts of the Sheboygan community. Check out Tzong Yang, Dan Welsch, and Frank Juárez stories to read the full series.
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Sheboygan is located on the western shore of Lake Michigan, has world-class sailing, premier charter fishing and has been called “The Malibu of the Midwest” for its great surfing. As of the 2020 census, Sheboygan has a population of 49,929 and is one of the largest Hmong communities in Wisconsin.
We partnered with The League of Wisconsin Municipalities for our Sheboygan story series. The LWM advocates for Wisconsin’s cities and villages, large and small, urban and rural, speaking up for local democracy and common-sense citizen-led government. Learn more here.