Third Place

You already know what a third place is. You just might not have a name for it.

It's the diner counter where the coffee appears before you order it. The barbershop where the same four people have been arguing about the same things for fifteen years. The library reading room on a Tuesday morning. The bar in Boston where everybody knows your name.

Ray Oldenburg named it in 1989: the third place, the informal gathering space beyond home and work where people are known, where status gets checked at the door, and where conversation is the whole point. He argued it wasn't a luxury. It was infrastructure. Something a community couldn't function well without.

We built the interstates and the suburbs and the drive-throughs. We moved online. And somewhere along the way, the third place got harder to find.

In this volume of the I'm No Expert, But series, Jim Stovall traces the third place from the penny universities of 1650s England to the golden age of the American diner counter to the partial promise of the digital world - and then to the one civic institution that has quietly kept the promise alive.

Seven things. About an hour. And a quiet argument that the most important room in your community might be the one you've been walking past without stopping.