Is your coffee shop a third place?

Coffee shop, diner, or café - these special places help us get through the day

Ray Oldenburg is the sociologist who coined the term third place: not home, not work, but the places we go to relax and talk. I’m now the coauthor on a new edition of his landmark The Great Good Place. It’s a great good book and I have been promising fans that I am not going to wreck it, or change it too much. I’ll just be tightening it here and there, and adding topics that didn’t make it into the book in 1989 - some of them didn’t exist in 1989!

Third places have been getting a lot of attention of late (check out the TikTok video below, which has got a lot of attention). As a result, Ray and I have been asked to contribute an article to an issue of the UNESCO Courier magazine focused on Coffee Shops.

@nathanallebachWe need walkable communities to support third places and third places to support healthy societies #thirdplace #thirdplaces #walkability #walkablecities #walkablecommunities #urbanplanning #urbanism #community #carfree

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Ray wrote about coffee shops, cafes, and bistros in The Great Good Place - wonderful stuff, as you'll see from the extracts below - but we need to bring the book up to date. We would love to hear your ideas about the role of coffee shops as third places, and about what’s happened, or changed, in your part of the world in recent years, and especially after the lockdowns of 2020-21.

As food for thought, how about coffee and laundry together? I saw Jenkies Joint "Caffeine ~ Food ~ Laundry" when I went to western Pennsylvania a year ago to test drive a train. We didn’t have time to stop, but I’m intrigued by the idea of combining a coffee shop with other enterprises (including bookstores, of course). I’ve heard of coffee shops that become casual bars in the evening, for example.

“The breadth of its invitation, the inclusiveness of its ranks, and its unequivocal acceptance of all men, lent an aura of excitement to the early coffeehouses. . . . The coffeehouse was democracy at birth, equality incarnate.”

The single most important attribute of a third place is that people talk to one another. Conversation is key. By this measure, many libraries, which used to preserve a holy silence, are now sociable third places. Some of them even have coffee for sale.

One of Ray's big concerns is zoning, which has almost uniformly had a negative effect on our third places. I want to have a chapter about zoning in the new edition, but I'm keeping his comment in mind, "How can you make zoning interesting?" I'm not sure, but I think I'll start with a question he posed in an email in April 2020, as we were just coming to terms with the lockdown but still assuming it wouldn't last very long.

"Imagine," he wrote, "someone owning a corner house in a single-use, zoned suburb, knocked out some interior walls, added tables and chairs all around, opened at 5:00 AM and served coffee, donuts, and cold beverages until 5:00 PM.  There would be no parking lot, of course, and no signage.  To what would neighbors object?"

I thought about how this would work in my neighborhood. I have a house on a corner where the school bus stops, and a 20-foot living room that could easily work as a café. And I'm always up by 5am.

Admittedly, I don't want to run a café, but in theory I suppose I could sit at one of the tables and write or deal with my production freelancers much of the day.

But here in Great Barrington, we already have a good coffee shop or two or three within walking distance. Ray was really thinking of suburban stretches, like his neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida, where you can't walk to anything. I've been lucky. Even in my childhood neighborhood in the  Silicon Valley we could walk to stores and to the library. But that's not the case for many, many people.

Since this letter goes to people all over the world I'm hoping to get some fresh ideas. Where do you go for a cup of coffee? Do you think it's a third place? What's great about it and how could it be better?

One thing that doesn't get enough attention is the "price of admission" to a third place. The great third places aren't expensive. This is an important point when we're all worrying about inflation and recession. The government cuts - known as "austerity" - of the last decade in the UK has had a devastating effect on local pubs, and no doubt on coffee shops, too. How about the price of Starbucks drinks, or the price of a beer at an American bar?

Maybe that'll be the motivator for neighborhood cafes: coffee and food that cheap enough for everyone.

Coffee houses played a vital role in political history, as the preferred location for political debate. But they weren’t popular with everyone, including the disgruntled father in Bach’s comic Coffee Cantata, or the writers of The Women's Petition Against Coffee. Ray tells the story¹:

Scarcely two decades after it first appeared and emerged as exclusively male, the coffeehouse became the target of The Women's Petition Against Coffee—a remarkable manifesto, observed Ellis, and indeed it was.

Until recently the language of the Women’s Petition was considered to be so obscene and vulgar as to preclude its printing. The first definitive history of the English coffeehouse appeared in 1956, and it must have pained its author to omit the ten paragraphs of that brief but colorful document. Five of those ten paragraphs (including the first four) made the claim that the “base, black, thick, nasty bitter stinking, nauseous Puddle water” causes impotence in the male. Contending that Englishmen were once justly esteemed the “Ablest Performers” in Christendom, the document proclaimed a new and deplorable state of affairs as brought about by coffee:

“But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come Sa fa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us. Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.”

From the coffeehouses, charged the petitioners, the men came home “with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.”

In addition to the allegation of impotence, the petitioners claimed that coffee was turning men into gossips and tattletales, that the pennies spent for coffee took bread out of the mouths of children, that Englishmen had become better talkers than fighters, and that the coffeehouse was “only a Pimp to the Tavern” in that men were alleged frequently to migrate between the two.

These women were evidently ticked off about being excluded from the coffee houses. And they had some definite ideas of what they wanted in a man!

Here in Great Barrington, the hangout on Main Street used to be The Coffee Shop (today, under new owners, it’s across the street and called Fuel). I was there the morning after a local bigshot published a newspaper column calling those of us on the other side of a local issue “un-American.” The Coffee Shop was abuzz that morning with people saying, “I’ll tell him what’s un-American!” That’s a third place, and that’s what made them dangerous to people in power. Long may we have places to meet, to talk, to argue, to learn to speak truth to power.

Please write to me with your coffee shop or third place story to share, either in the Comments or by email.

This and the following passage come from the chapter o “Classic Coffeehouses” in The Great Good Place.

1.