Celebrating Ray Oldenburg (1932-2022)
“The third place is such a simple idea - the wonder is that it had to catch on.”
Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist whose determination to write in plain English meant rewriting The Great Good Place eight times, died on 21 November 2022. He was 90 years old, and left a legacy that seems to have a larger footprint every day. (Do a search for the term “third place” and you’ll see that almost every article or post mentions Ray.)
His influence was global, and he did some long-distance travel as a consultant to various cities after the book was published. But there was no gloss on Ray. He wasn’t looking for glory. He had distinguished a facet of human culture that simply hadn’t had a name before. He wanted to see the third place appreciated, and cultivated. He had little time for the kind of people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
How appropriate then that this Tik-Tok video (it had gone viral, my correspondent said) leads with walkability. If I’d been able to share it with Ray, I’m sure we would have talked again about the disastrous effect of single-use zoning, which makes so many towns and neighborhoods unwalkable.
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I mourn the fact that I won’t be seeing him again, or letting him mix me a cocktail, but I’m increasingly grateful for all I’ve learned from him, from the book I was handed on a snowy December day in 1990, from our 20 years of occasional correspondence, and from our three meetings, when I traveled to Florida to spend a few days with him and his wife Judith.
After the first of those trips, I started looking for someone to coauthor a new edition of The Great Good Place. It was clear that the book needed to discuss how social media and social infrastructure related to third places. There were subjects Ray hadn’t covered, such as third places and children, and third places for the elderly. There were issues of gender and diversity to be addressed, and while Ray wrote a lot about Europe, the book was appealing to people around the world (there are Russian and Korean editions) so I thought we needed to have examples from more countries.
I talked to people who knew and admired the book, but no one who felt they could take on a new edition. As I continued to correspond with Ray, especially as we worked on The Joy of Tippling, I realized that I was thinking about third places a lot, and that I’d been making observations ever since we started corresponding many years earlier.
I told him that I’d like to do it, and we agreed this before the pandemic began early in 2020. He began sending people to me. I got to talk to people in France, Norway, China, and Brazil, as well as in the United States, who had contacted him because they had projects underway and were interested in the third-place concept. Journalists came to us (Bloomberg CityLab; BBC Worklife), and UNESCO invited us to contribute an article for an issue about coffee houses (it’ll be out in May).
Ray was slowing down, and the pandemic curtailed his activities further. Nonetheless, we managed to record a phone conversation - now a Berkshire Bookworld podcast and also available here on Substack - and enjoyed two Zoom cocktail hours thanks to his pal Robert Dugan, formerly the library director at Ray’s university.
“The third place is such a simple idea - the wonder is that it had to catch on.”
Newly edited, this video will give you a chance to hear from Ray himself. It was taken on my phone in 2012, filed away, and forgotten for a decade. I came across it just a couple of weeks before Ray’s death, while I was working on our article for UNESCO focused on coffee houses. It was serendipity that Ray leads off the conversation with coffee.
The obituary in the Pensacola News Journal included a mention of Ray’s last book, The Joy of Tippling: A Salute to Bars, Taverns, and Pubs, which I had the pleasure of publishing. It’s a lovely book, and excellent introduction to the concept of the third place. And it has recipes!
Berkshire Publishing will also include a small book on Third Places in its new series of Very VERY Short Introductions, drawing on the material Ray wrote and commissioned for the Encyclopedia of Community.
The newsletter below, written before the pandemic, drew some wonderful responses and suggestions from readers when it went out from Berkshire Publishing:
I’m looking for more ideas about third places - the ones we’ve lost, the ones we need, and the ones we’re creating and sustaining.
Oh boy. I’ve spent the day unable to shake this piece. I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago. Every house had front steps. After the news in the warmer months you would go out and sit. Dad had a cigarette. Mom would sit with dad with her housecoat around her knees. Us kids would come out and sit and listen to the conversations. Neighbors would walk over and linger - leaning against the rail by the stairs if the steps were full. Younger kids would fall asleep in the laps of those who were willing to hold and comfort. It was such an extension of my life this front stair community.