George's place
A man with a dream in upstate New York
I corresponded with Ray Oldenburg for 20 years before meeting in person. I never dreamed that I would, another decade on, find myself responsible for writing a new version, a sequel really, to Ray’s landmark book, The Great Good Place.
His book was published in 1989, as was Home Ecology, my first book. I lived in London then, but learned about The Great Good Place late that year when I traveled to the US and my editor handed me Ray’s book, saying, “I think this will interest you.”
It didn’t just interest me: it changed the whole focus of my environmental writing. And it did something else that it did for many readers: it made us conscious of something missing from our lives, something we recognized when he described it but had never had a way to talk about.
In 1991, I returned to the US, to a small town in upstate New York where I rented a farmhouse from the friend of a friend. Philmont’s claim to fame was that it was the hometown of Oliver North, the army colonel involved in Ronald Reagan’s Contra scandal.1 It was a faded, dilapidated little town that survived thanks to second-home owners, like the woman I was renting from, and families who moved there to put their kids in the private Steiner (or Waldorf) school nearby. There was a restaurant, a pizza parlor, a supermarket, a gas station, and a windowless bar on Main Street, as well as a few offices and, inevitably, several large empty buildings with For Rent signs.
Ray’s book had made me appreciate British pubs in a new way, and also made me aware that as a woman I simply didn’t have the options many men had, in terms of a local hangout. In Philmont, I once had a drink at the windowless bar on Main Street, but only when I had a man with me - my married lover from New York, who was utterly baffled, having never read The Great Good Place. It was not a successful outing, and I haven’t entered a dive bar since then, though I see them now and then and always wonder what’s happening there and if they might be real third places for some.
One day I saw racks of clothes and some chairs and dressers arranged on the sidewalk in front of the first building on Philmont’s Main Street, next to the Stewart’s gas station on the corner. It had big plate-glass windows under a huge yellow sign reading Richardson’s Paints, with a picture of a can of paint being pour over a globe. Until then, the windows had been papered over and the building empty.
I parked the pushchair and went inside, puzzling over the odd mix of items and the tables and chairs arranged cafe style near the front windows. My children dived into a box of stuffed animals. A man walked over and introduced himself. He and his wife had moved to Philmont because of the Steiner School, he explained, and he wanted to do something for the community.
George told me nothing about himself, his background, his previous work, his family, but he shared his vision for that old building with me. He saw the shop floor transformed, divided into different spaces for different activities. He would sell books, too, and furniture and used clothing, but what he really wanted to create was a place where people would want to stay for a while. He told me about his plan to start serving coffee and set up tables for chess.
He was picturing a third place and I wish I’d asked where this idea came from. Had he too read The Great Good Place?
We chatted on a few other occasions. He recommended the Book Barn in Hillsdale, giving precise directions to every turn, every landmark, every road surface. Another time, he told me about the man who lived up the wooden staircase on the side of the building. “He gets every magazine you could think of, and plenty I’ve never heard of. And he lies there all day, just reading, and reading. Have you and the kids had lunch yet? There’s always food over there. Harry feeds half the people in town. Anyone who’s passing through. I had lasagna last night. He asked if he wasn’t the best landlord I’d ever had. ‘ How many landlords throw meals in with the rent?’”
A month later, I told George I was moving to an apartment near Great Barrington and asked him to help with a few pieces of furniture that could go on the truck I’d hired to transport my books. Great Barrington had a coffee shop, he said, and a Japanese restaurant. And crosswalks across Main Street that cars actually stopped at.2
The shabby old couch is long gone, but the wooden table George sold me is still in my dining room. I think of him when I drive to the Book Barn (a marvelous place, still in business)3, and I was sorry not to be there to see his plans unfold - or not. He seemed the kind of person who would be a great third place host, and I hope that he found somewhere to put his ideas into practice.
One of the questions I have to answer in the new book is exactly this: How to make a third place? George had the vision, but were there really enough people in and around Philmont to make his coffee house viable? Decades and even centuries ago, even a village could sustain a diner or cafe or pub, but our lives are more dispersed today so it’s much harder to get the critical mass for a new third place, especially in locations like Philmont where many residents are seasonal or weekend only.
But the dream was there, in George’s funky shop, and in what this TV character calls the five words every man will say sometime in his life: We should buy a bar.4 Here’s the clip, along with others I’ve started gathering from various TV shows and movies. and here’s my YouTube playlist. (Suggestions are welcome.) I especially like the one from Cheers.
If you know of start-ups that aim to be third places, please get in touch.
Philmont is only 20 miles from Great Barrington, where I live now. But that part of New York is what we now call “Red,” and the town leaders seemed to be proud of Oliver North, criminal conviction or not. Somewhere I have a folder of newspaper clippings about the celebrations of the local boy who became famous.
This remains an attractive feature of Great Barrington. Some of our sidewalks are, in “Blue” Massachusetts style, painted in rainbow colors.
Here’s a recent article. And I’ll include a photo below.
In fact, the publishing guy who gave me that copy of The Great Good Place said exactly that; the book had made him want to open a tavern in Boulder.
