Photo Essay by Sean Danaher
Story by Jennifer Adler
The lights are always on at Eugene City Bakery; even in the peaking hours of the morning workers can be found making the delicious pastries hungry customers buy every morning. Behind the scenes of the bakery is a group of friends and a laid-back environment that the workers created.
In the back there are two rooms, one for the pastry baking and one for the bread baking. Both are unwelcomingly hot. McKenzie Davie works on the pastry side and describes her work as a high-production job because she has to make so many of the pastries before morning comes. On the other end, there is the bread-making side that Davie calls strenuous because the baker constantly puts large pans of bread into and out of the wall of ovens lining the room.
Davie refers to the job as an art.
“[Baking] is an art form, bread is an art form, pastry is an art form, fermentation is an art form,” Davie says. “The control of bacteria and the control of yeast activity is like brewing beer or sauerkraut, patience and constant nurturing.”
Although the bakers have a lot to do in their night shifts, Davie says the job is more self-governing than most.
“It’s a very independent job, you don’t need a lot of management because you usually don’t see the management ever.”
Workers have the freedom to come in any time after the shop closes and stay as long as they need to finish their work for the evening. The hours the bakers work depends on how much the bakers can get done in a certain amount of time;, most come in around 8 p.m. and leave around 2 or 3 a.m. However, when the Saturday Market is in town most of bakers work until they see the sun rise, an experience Davie calls “bizarre and disconnected.”
The friendship that the bakers share has an interesting history. The Stonehenge, a house near the Laurelwood Golf Course, is home to most of the bakers that work at the Eugene City Bakery. For 15 years, there has at least been one baker from the Eugene City Bakery living at The Stonehenge. The house’s dynamic is an unusual one; everyone comes and goes between all hours of the night and during the day, but in the end they are a family.
“We all care about each other,” Davie says.
Through the warm conditions of the bakery and sometimes intense labor that the job requires, the bakers are there because they simply enjoy baking. Eugene City Bakery has a delicious variety of pastries and breads. It’s mostly thanks to the graveyard shift workers that customers get to enjoy them.
