The Third Place

Musings on what a third place is when we're not allowed places

I’ve long been intrigued by this concept of the Third Place–I came across it whilst locked down, in a fascinating linguistics book called Because Internet. In this book, the author (one Gretchen McCulloch) was referencing the types of language used in online chat rooms and talked about something she called virtual third spaces. From there, I went to the book she was riffing off of, Ray Oldenburg’s OG work on the Third Place concept: The Great Good Place. This book is where I learned about the (albeit delivered in rather a curmudgeonly tone) Third Place idea in more detail. 

What’s the Third Place? It’s a vital social area, and a central place where arguably, all of society and culture happens. I want to write more about 3rd places in the future—I actually have a bunch of ideas about what a 3rd place changes into during and then after a pandemic lockdown. (I have a sinking feeling these ideas are going to have to be a book, eventually. Sigh. But, anyway.) I want to muse about and present the basics on this really cool sociological idea that maybe you haven’t heard of, vital to your human life though it is.

Also? There’s a section about the Third Place in the last chapter of my memoir, so I thought I’d separate all these 3rd place thoughts out from that larger work and put them here first, then parse back out the bits that I want to include in the chapter a little bit more easily from here. So. Join me on a little word-and-idea-vomit journey to the 3rd Place, won’t you?

Definition

In order to get close to a definition of what a 3rd place is, we should go over what the 1st and 2nd places are first. Ahem:

1st place: is home. The 1st place is where you relax, where your partner or family is. It’s where you sleep and mostly where you eat. It’s the hearth, and the center of both private and domestic life.

2nd place: is work. Or school, if that’s what you do for work. Work is the place where you go to do all yer bizness. It’s not a place where you relax or eat or socialize, though the latter two are of course possible in the 2nd place. You don’t live or sleep in the 2nd place. The 2nd place is where you leave those comforts of the 1st place to go to work all day, and come back home to the 1st place to relax when you’re done. 

3rd place: …is its own thing. It’s different than places 1 or 2. You don’t sleep there, but you can relax there. It’s a public place, but a place where you can be yourself. You don’t live there, but you do go there frequently, a home away from home. Your 3rd place friends are usually much more intimate than those from either other place, and of a more mixed population than those in your 1st place. It’s the corner bar, local pub, coffee shop, street corner, barbershop, etc.

Of course, any active human being can see all the ways in which the first two places are often mashed cruelly together, and the 3rd place eradicated. This can happen for many reasons, from homework to overwork to working from home to domestic labor, or even in the ways our neighborhoods are designed and built. This unhealthy mashing happens to an even larger extent during a global pandemic, too, as you can imagine…

Characteristics of a 3rd place

The 3rd place ain’t home, and it ain’t work, so what is it, exactly? It’s the place you go to unwind, a place where you pop in unannounced and unscheduled, where the conversation and activities therein aren’t planned. It’s where you go to gossip, and laugh. This is why it’s important for the 3rd place to be easily accessible, on foot ideally. Frequent unscheduled visits are vital to making a 3rd place, and having to drive there takes away this aspect, usually.

Most essentially, though, a 3rd place is centered on good conversation and ease of being. Laughter and gossip and talk of politics fly in a 3rd place–so much so, that the coffee houses of the past have been famously feared and attempted to be censored by monarchs and other leaders, afraid of the powerful community in these 3rd places and what they could or might do to the powers that be. This focus on good conversation is, according to Oldenburg, the one essential characteristic that sets a real 3rd place apart from other bars and gathering places that don’t hold that specialness in the lives of their patrons.

I have my own theory, that mind altering substances like caffeine or alcohol are also a vital characteristic of the 3rd place. I don’t really have any data to support this claim, other than that it seems to me that most of the pivotal 3rd places Oldenburg discusses and that I myself have enjoyed as a regular, seem to center not on food but on coffee or tea or booze.* Not sure why I feel like this is an important aspect, but caffeine or alcohol does pertain to good conversation (as well as personal intimacy). Maybe it’s just that. I’ll keep it.

So those are the three vital aspects of that vital pillar of human community, the 3rd place: easy accessibility, good conversation, and …relationship enhancing drugs. Sure. Let’s go with that.

Civic structures & design

In suburbia especially, you have to drive/plan in order to get anywhere, and with big entertainment centers now commonly found in many homes, it’s expected that you are doing all your 3rd place stuff in the 1st place instead. Suburbia doesn’t normally have that corner store or the local pub you can walk to in the evening, and many urban residential areas don’t anymore either. I’m talking about the US mainly, as this isolated suburban residential area thing is a more modern phenomenon in cities–often in older European cities you’ll still have accessible 3rd place pubs and cafes and the like. I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who lives in an uber-urban area in modern Japan, like Tokyo for example. I wonder if there are newer versions of the 3rd place bar or cafe that happen in oh-so-very-populated cities like Tokyo. Let me know.

3rd places need to be unscheduled and unsupervised, which is what makes a 3rd place that, and not just another restaurant or some such. This is why Oldenburg avers (and I tend to agree) that a 3rd place is ideally accessible on foot. Most modern residential areas don’t have walking access to pretty much anything, and the way much of modern life is scheduled, the sorts of leisure time needed for good frequent 3rd place visits tends to be nearly nonexistent at any rate. 

I’m living in a gated community right now in very office-park-y South Denver, but I am fortunate enough to be right across the street from a pub called I.C. Brewhouse (I = Inner, C = Circle), which has fast become my 3rd place since I moved here. Back in Boulder, my 3rd place was a pizza joint and taphouse called Backcountry Pizza, which was right down the block from The Birdhouse (my studio apartment). This place used to be a little overpriced bistro, so even when I was going to grad school a few steps away, my friends and I never went there. After it turned into this little dingy pizza joint, though, it became a 3rd place pretty much immediately. It’s right around the corner from the grungy college residential neighborhood in Boulder, and just down the hill from campus, so amid the old salty drinkers that frequented the place, many college kids would come through too.

But I.C. Brewhouse is interesting–there are two in existence that I know about right now, and each pub also owns (and was built by) the luxury apartment complexes they’re in the parking lots of. One in Castle Rock, one here in Centennial. So what I’m seeing here is a comfy bar that’s literally made to be a 3rd place (they call it a “neighborhood gathering place” on their website)–it’s a bar made to be an essential part of the residential area, made to be right there for those that live there. Sort of akin to a restaurant in a hotel lot, but much more comfy, for permanent or long-term residents instead of the migratory, making the 3rd place possibilities much more likely to appear. I have a feeling that’s what the name Inner Circle refers to, as well–the regulars at Inner Circle are all members of that inner circle.

This image is titled “30 people getting coffee vs. 30 people getting coffee.” I yoinked it from Reddit.

In the absence of a 3rd place

Sometimes, 2nd places are expected to function as a 3rd place substitute, which is a little forced feeling and creepy. I’m thinking startups and their stereotypical amenities like craft beer taps and couches and pet dogs and ping-pong. I think this feels creepy because it’s this vaguely threatening idea that you should never want to leave work–that the 2nd place should be the center of all your pleasure and all your life.

Similarly, 1st places, especially during pandemic lockdown and even still now after things are opening up again, are expected to be all 3 places at once, all the time. When you’re not going into an office for work or leaving home for school, then you’re also not stopping by the pub or the corner store or the coffee shop on your way home–it’s all located there in the 1st place. I’ll go out on a limb and surmise that this is one major reason why people went crazy during lockdown, and why many haven’t really recovered yet.

If a 3rd place isn’t accessible or doesn’t exist, people will make their own. I can think of two major examples from my own life, and I’m sure you can think of plenty from yours, too.** My examples include a parking lot and a hallway.

One of the courtyard/parking lots of our apartment complex during strict lockdown time started blooming with regular gatherings like clockwork. This began with just a family or two (they looked like what we used to call a “pandemic pod”) taking their kids out for some fresh air and to run around a bit. This was in 2020 when all pubs and other 3rd places were closed, and school and work was nearly all from home. My partner would go to the grocery store, masked, once a week, and we still surface-washed all the items he found there. It was a paranoid, isolated time. Because of this, I used to do a lot of my work outside on the balcony in an elaborate porch chair. That first little pod used to come outside daily, around a happy hour time of day. Then more families and others began to join them, and more, and more. Till right at the end of the lockdown time of 2020, there was a populous daily block party in the parking lot below my balcony perch, replete with snacks, laughter, kids’ bike races, and adults playing pass-the-baby. I’ve moved across the complex from that balcony and adjacent lot since then, so I don’t know if a similar thing still occurs, but I do see some of those same kids now outside the gates waiting for a school bus each day, so. Probably not.

When Gretchen McCulloch discussed the populations of academic hallways in conferences and other classroom buildings being a vibrant row of 3rd places, I knew exactly what she was talking about, because of the short stretch of hallway in front of room 271 and the Theatre and Dance department office, in the Arts building on Auraria Campus. ARTS 271 is one of those theatre classrooms that function more like a performance space than like a traditional classroom, and as such, most theatre students have most of their classes held there. During any breaks between classes, that few-doors-long stretch of hallway would teem with (mostly) kids eating snacks, sipping coffee, and of course, talking. Conversation is the anchor of any 3rd place, and the ARTS 271 hallway illustrated this.

This hallway was such a vital place for the Metro theatre students (and some of us teachers), that when we all were locked down at home during 2020, we couldn’t abide its lack. So my colleague Jeff took it upon himself to make a virtual version of the hallway, using Zoom. It was even titled ARTS 271 Hallway. An invented 3rd place twice removed, the Zoom version was an okay substitute for a while, but since it had to be scheduled, it didn’t take on all the characteristics of a 3rd place, and so it went away as soon as the in-person hallway opened back up. 

Function of a 3rd place

What’s 3rd place good for? It provides a neutral ground and opens up for informal interactions, in a way that neither other place can. Oldenburg connects these two functions as the one allowing the other to happen:

“Where neutral ground is available it makes possible for more informal, even intimate, relations among people than could be entertained in the home.”***

The 3rd place contains a more mixed group of people than you’ll normally find in your workplace, and certainly in your home. But it’s got the best of both those worlds: you run into a diverse crowd with whom you can be yourself, loosen up, and engage in good conversation and laughter.

Virtual 3rd places

With the advent of easy, commonly found, and affordable for the most part internet in many 1st places (and nearly all 2nd places), new kinds of 3rd places have opened up. People like Stephenson (Snow Crash), Gibson before him (Neuromancer), and now Zuckerberg (the Metaverse) envisioned a virtual place-that’s-not-a-real-place you could log in and virtually go to as an avatar (like Second Life tried to be). These men imagined that people would gather in these virtual worlds and treat them like malls and other gathering places, even into being a 3rd place in the 4th dimension…but I’ve noticed those types of virtual places never took off. It’s in an actual game, or in a text-based chat like Discord or chat rooms on Twitch, that people hang out together virtually the way they do in a physical 3rd place. 

Keeping in mind the necessary characteristics of a 3rd place, it’s easy to see that online chat rooms, like the AOL ones we used to frequent in the ‘90s, check all the 3rd place boxes. It’s a place you go to for good conversation, the people you hang out with there may or may not appear in other areas of your life (often they don’t), and it’s unscheduled–you show up whenever and see who else has shown up.**** Online games can have a similar dynamic, especially MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) where you don’t have to arrange the meetups to play. If you’ve ever played games like this (or listened to someone else do so), you’ll notice that a gaming sesh feels a lot like getting together at a cafe with buddies and playing a board game, like what you see in so many trendy breweries these days. Twitch, too, can be a similar style of 3rd place, as the streamer responds to the chatters who type. Twitch, especially within a smaller crowd of followers, feels like a friendly get together with a movie playing in the background. I frequent a streamer myself who lives in Ireland, and we always end up chatting about different favorite snacks in the various countries of the people there, and stuff like that.

Zoom doesn’t work this way–maybe because it’s mainly used as a second place? I think that’s what it is–you don’t feel that same sort of informal ease that a 3rd place has, because it always has to be scheduled. This is why the virtual ARTS 271 hallway was okay in a pinch, but wasn’t really the same thing, since there was a specific window of time when it existed. 

Social media doesn’t work like a 3rd place, either, mainly because it’s much more staged. The way we present ourselves on social media platforms is much more for show–that essential aspect of a 3rd place that allows ease, laughter, and for patrons to be truly themselves is absent, as is good conversation. Discussion threads can be valuable for other reasons, but it isn’t conversation, not happening in real time with a real person present behind the text. It’s more of a shared writing exercise than it is talk.

Conclusion

A Third Place is a place to belong, amid a mixed group of people, where you can be yourself and engage in good conversation and a mildly mind-altering substance. It’s the corner bar, the coffee shop on the corner, the Inner Circle, where you can show up unannounced and unscheduled, be unsupervised and completely yourself with the friends you only see there. Political revolutions, artistic movements, and good company all happen in the Third Place–that place where everybody knows your name…

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* There are exceptions to this, of course, like the populated academic hallways that McCulloch talks about on pp.221-222 of Because Internet. Those, while indeed vital and powerful third places, do seem to be exceptions to the mind-altering substance rule. Though, I guess there is usually coffee there, huh…

**Can I hear about these in the comments? Please and thank you?

***Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, pp.22-23

****And as far as my extra rule about coffee or other enhancing drinks? That’s often a thing too, depending on where a chat user is physically during their time in the 3rd place. I often have rose wine or iced coffee whilst watching my favorite Twitch streamer, and used to drink rum over the Red Dragon Inn chat room in the middle of the night back in 1996. Gamers these days famously down energy drinks.

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NOTE: This is a concept I’ve been interested in for a while, but this particular post appeared originally on Daily Cross-Swords on October 13, 2022.