The labor movement is experiencing a mini-revival, with a fresh round of teacher strikes and the first-ever unionization of a US Amazon fulfillment center. And Starbucks workers, who are organizing union drives with the Starbucks Workers United campaign, are the crest of this new wave. Since the first unionization of a US Starbucks shop in Buffalo at the end of last year, nine additional stores have won elections, with almost two hundred more stores filing union petitions across the country.

The Starbucks Reserve Roastery, an elevated concept store located in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, is the latest of the chain’s stores to unionize. (The original Reserve Roastery in Seattle has an election on April 21.) The roastery is also the first Starbucks in New York City to win a union. Mail-ballot elections are upcoming at stores at Astor Place, Manhattan; in Astoria, Queens; and in Caesar’s Bay, Brooklyn, as well as at locations in Great Neck and Massapequa on Long Island.

Founded in 2018, the New York chapter of the Starbucks Reserve Roasteries sits on the first floor of an all-glass exterior, nine-story building designed by Rafael Viñoly. The dazzling flagship store itself was designed in-house. The expansive space is lit with bold geometric square fixtures, while copper “symphony pipes” overhead fly coffee beans from a three-story-tall copper cask to large silos above the main coffee bar. It all happens under the careful eye of the ten-foot, two-thousand-pound copper “siren muse” sculpture. One worker at the roastery called it “the Disneyland of coffee.”