An Ode to My New Library
And all the third places I’ve loved before
“And sometimes a writer will encounter one of these settings and write about this tiny but glowing ember of humanity among the cold ashes of our public domain, and do so as though it represented an American triumph. Our expectations seem as small as the amount of space we’ve preserved for an informal public life.” —Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place
This summer, the public library closest to my home in Portland reopened after a major renovation. The century-old stucco building now opens into a wood-paneled addition that takes up the whole block. There’s a courtyard and a patch of computers and an expanse of comfy chairs and tables that are always nearly filled with people on their laptops. The original space, though bright and white-walled, retains the cozy, musty vibe that all old public libraries seem to share, but the new space feels—even somehow smells—like my college library. Only with a dedicated room for teens and the occasional shriek of a toddler.
I’ve been working there in the afternoons a few days a week. It’s a 25-minute walk from my house, just far enough that about half the time I feel too busy or lazy to walk or bike, so I drive, to my shame. I text my plans to my friend Erica, a fellow freelance writer, on days that I know she might be free to co-work with me. When she’s sitting across from me, I’m happier and more productive, which is to say: when she’s sitting across from me, it feels more like college. Though if it were really college, I wouldn’t text—I’d just go and find her there.
***
At my college library, if I wasn’t there studying, I was there finding my friends. The ground floor was the fourth floor and the most chatty one, with three more below it with declining levels of noise permitted. I worked mainly on the fourth floor, maybe the third. I would descend to the silent bottom floor only to search for my friend Martha, clad in large headphones at one of her preferred tucked-away cubicles, to see if she could be convinced to walk over to the snack bar and split some fried mozzarella sticks. Passing by, I’d stop in to see my friend Sam, who was easier to locate; at any hour of the day, there was probably a fifty-fifty chance he’d be either working his job at the front circulation desk or asleep on the couch near the entryway, an ironic sentry to a space ostensibly for hard work.
Perhaps because the library was, for me, a place associated with both studying and socializing, when I needed to really focus—i.e., when I had procrastinated on writing a paper for as long as I possibly could—I usually went elsewhere. Even then, the lower levels of the library were too oppressively quiet for my taste and retreating to work alone in my room was unthinkable. Instead, I would wake up at six—or earlier depending on just how close I was cutting it—and find a spot on the upper level of the student center or walk to Blue Monday’s, the coffee shop a few blocks from campus. Both places would eventually get crowded, but for the first couple hours I worked, their usual bustle and din would be muted, its imprint on the space just a faint, comforting residue. By the time the morning rush hit, I’d be so immersed in my writing that I could block out anything and everything.
Fueled by deadline stress, coffee, and a croissant, I would work until my work was done, and then I would rejoin the world: lift my head up, look around, maybe walk over to another table to say hi to a friend.
***
Early in the pandemic, swept up in the sense of utter discombobulation—if everything could change so rapidly, then perhaps anything was possible—I momentarily decided to pause work on the non-fiction book I was researching and try to write a novel. Instead of reading dense books on capitalism and health, working on my novel mostly involved re-reading 15 years worth of Gmail correspondence with my closest friends and exes from college. Every evening over dinner, I would read snippets from my “research” aloud to my roommate Lizzie, a friend since college, and we would writhe with affection and embarrassment for our younger selves.
For my purposes, the early post-college years provided the most extensive treasure trove: hours of G-chat conversations about our first apartments, first internships, first real jobs, first post-college relationships, first cross-country moves. From the college years, there were emails exchanged during breaks, remarkable for how long and well-written they were, how devoted we were to sharing all the details of our lives with each other, exciting travels and boring summers at home alike.
But there was little textual record of our relationships while actually on our small college campus, because, of course, we were with each other nearly all the time. And when we weren’t, we would be again soon, usually without any need to plan or schedule when that would occur. We were with each other in a way we would never be again, a way largely resistant to documentary evidence. Searching back in time in my inbox, I found the emails I sent to my friend Nolan during our senior year, a period when we were inseparable. Many are just subject lines with no body text and no reply:
“I’m at the library now”
“Good morning. Mondays??!”
“are you working somewhere”
During my deep-lockdown deep-dive, it is these emails that provoke the strongest pang of longing. What did we talk about back then, when we saw each other every day, when we learned together, worked together, ate together, drank together, danced together, played together? My inbox archive can’t provide many answers. Then, digital technology was used not to build or maintain a relationship but simply, sparingly to facilitate its continued unfolding in physical space. Yet, no less than the long emails or marathon G-chat convos of later years, these brief anti-epistolary emails are also proof of love. In a time and place that offered a half dozen spaces I could walk into and likely find a friend to co-work with, they said: I want to sit across from you.
***
I had the good sense to abandon the novel and return to my non-fiction book. At the moment, I’m reading about the loneliness epidemic. I recently finished sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place, in which he coined the term “third places” and lamented their decline in the United States.
Not home, not workplace, a third place is another regularly visited space “where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances.” After industrialization separated home (first place) from workplace (second place), such places became more important for offering opportunities for daily socializing. A third place is defined not by its form but by its function as an informal social hub; a library, a coffee shop, a park, a pub—all can be third places but they also might not reach their potential. The best third places, according to Oldenburg, are “inclusive and local,” and frequented by a large concentration of regulars, such that one can go alone and be sure to find company there.
In the United States, third places were arguably never as culturally entrenched as in some countries—think of the classic French cafe or English pub—but when Oldenburg was writing in the late eighties, they had become seriously endangered, under siege by a number of trends a few decades in the making. Urban sprawl and zoning laws that keep first, second, and third places geographically separated had killed off many neighborhood taverns, diners, and corner stores. Americans increasingly lived in areas where, Oldenburg writes, there was “nothing to walk to and no place to gather.” If driving is required to reach a third place, you’re less likely to visit regularly and less likely to see familiar faces when you do. In the suburbs especially, “the privatization of life is no longer optional but spatially enforced.”
Not only were third places less numerous and less conveniently distributed, the character of those that remained was changing. Publicly funded free third places, like libraries and parks, were beginning to fall victim to neoliberal budget cuts that left many poorly maintained. In the drive for greater profits, commercial third places increasingly prioritized high prices and/or fast service over offering an environment that welcomed all and encouraged patrons to stay and hang out awhile. The mall—which had replaced many third places by then—was the quintessential example, meticulously designed to “welcome shoppers, not loafers.” As historian E. P. Thompson wrote, “In mature Capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labor force merely to ‘pass the time.’”
Not that people had much time to pass anyway. Work hours had begun to creep up from their low point in the post-war period. In more and more families, both parents worked for pay, in a system that still somehow assumed a full-time housewife was available to do the work of maintaining the home. After meeting the demands of the first and second place, plus commuting between the two, there was little time left over to linger in third places—especially when they were no longer located just down the block.
Meanwhile, more and more entertainment was available inside the home. While we once usually had to leave our first places to have fun—to drink alcohol, play pool, grill, go swimming, see a movie—these diversions were increasingly found within them. The privatization of recreation was bad for community but good for the economy. As Oldenburg writes, “The worst student of arithmetic could understand that more money would be spent in a nation where every household tries to own what a community once provided for all.”
In Oldenburg’s telling, we were tempted to retreat into our first places—in part by advertising that “convinces people that the good life can be individually purchased”—but we were also pushed by the disappearance and deterioration of third places; we “sought refuge in homes and fenced yards as the larger world about us lost its homelike qualities.” By the eighties, Americans were spending about 90 percent of our leisure time in “overequipped homes” within “underequipped neighborhoods.” We act, Oldenburg writes, “as though a house can substitute for a community if only it is spacious enough, entertaining enough, comfortable enough, splendid enough.”
Today, the conversation about loneliness in the United States often centers on social media and smartphones. But reading Oldenburg, it’s clear that, at least when it comes to the third places so critical to creating a sense of community, they were late-comers to the funeral. And while these more recent developments have certainly further facilitated our withdrawal from the public sphere, they are also compensatory. We turned to Twitter—initially billed as a “virtual town square”—after our memories of the actual town square had already faded. We compulsively reach for our phones in today’s potential third places because we no longer feel relaxed in public. Like a house, a personal social network tries—and fails—to substitute for a community.
***
Oldenburg’s book is clearly animated by his nostalgia for the pre-war small town he grew up in, where all of Main Street served as a third place. People chatted and loitered at the post office, the drug store’s soda fountain, on the street itself. Oldenburg’s hometown (pseudonymously profiled in the book) happens to be just 40 miles from my liberal arts college in southern Minnesota.
I am—obviously—just as nostalgic for my small campus, where the lines between first, second, and third place collapsed entirely. Work—such as it was—and socializing were intermingled in both time and space, and my friend slept as easily in a highly trafficked spot in the library as in his small shared dorm room. The sense of being “at home” suffused the whole campus—and several blocks surrounding it too.
There’s an impulse in me to be a little suspicious of our nostalgia, both Oldenburg’s and my own. Surely, a small Minnesotan town in 1940 had its dark sides. Certainly, my college was not perfect. But I’m also suspicious of that impulse: the urge to qualify my nostalgia, to demonstrate my awareness of how communities can be oppressive and exclusive, to guard against charges of rose-colored glasses.
I read a Tweet years ago, and when I tried to find it again recently, I found multiple posts expressing the same sentiment:
According to sociologist Philip Slater, author of the 1970 book The Pursuit of Loneliness, “Community life exists when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows.” There’s a difference between idealizing any particular community—all of which inevitably have their flaws—and grieving the loss of a community life at all.
I also suspect that the twinge of embarrassment I feel about my nostalgia for college is itself a reflection of the problem. There’s a voice I’ve half-internalized that says: Of course you loved that privileged time, when you worked simply for the sake of learning, spent more time hanging out with friends than anything else, and didn’t worry about paying rent or even cooking your meals. But we all must eventually grow up, enter the real world, work for a living. But that’s the voice of capitalism, with its glorification of work and gospel of consumption, its relentless fetishization of productivity and efficiency above all else. That’s the mentality that got us here: living in a world with neither the time nor space to simply sit and be together awhile.
What I actually think is that nobody should have to work in order to live; that I’ve yet to find anything I’d rather do more with my time than hang out with my friends; that the real world should be remade—in so many ways—to be more like college.
***
In his book Together on the loneliness epidemic, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy outlines the three main types of loneliness that researchers recognize: In intimate/emotional loneliness, we long for a close confidante or intimate partner; in relational/social loneliness, for quality friendships and companionship; in collective loneliness, for a community of people who share our interests and sense of purpose.
Oldenburg argues persuasively that third places are also critical to both our individual and collective wellbeing, and cannot be replaced by these other forms of social connection. Someone can have deep intimate relationships and many close friends, even membership in more narrow interest/purpose-based communities, but still hunger for the kind of diffuse informal belonging found in vibrant third places. Furthermore, Oldenburg argues, without such places, other social ties suffer. Our romantic and family relationships become overburdened and claustrophobic; our friendships feel one-dimensional and disconnected from a larger context.
On the collective level, the kind of informal connection formed in third places is the foundation upon which more formal types of civic association develop. Oldenburg quotes an early twentieth century historian of rural America, who notes that before the infrastructures of community—the clubs and organizations and unions and political parties—could be built, the “substance of community” had to be present: the “casual, incidental, informal, and temporary meeting” of acquaintances in public places. A little over a decade after Oldenburg’s book, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone famously documented how these more quantifiable markers of community were also on the decline in the United States.
Despite its importance to personal and societal health, a community life is, unfortunately, not something that individuals can themselves bring about. As Oldenburg writes, “A community is a collective reality that does not depend upon the inclusion or exclusion of any given individual.” We have some agency in creating and sustaining other forms of social connection. Though they are also under threat—from some of the same trends that have weakened third places—there is more room to personally resist the forces of atomization. We can introduce ourselves to our neighbors, host a regular dinner party, join a sports team or volunteer group, call a long-distance friend to really catch up instead of just liking their posts on Instagram. But no matter how motivated, we cannot build the kind of place-based community once found—incidentally, effortlessly—in third places any more than we can clap with one hand.
When I was finishing writing my first book, I lived in my childhood home in St. Paul and worked at one of the two coffee shops within walking distance. Every day, I sat at the same spot and often stayed for more than eight hours, leaving my laptop there when I took breaks outside to talk on the phone or walk around the block a few times. The last third place I treated with as much ownership, as if it were my own living room, was probably my college library. I came to recognize the faces of some regulars and I’m sure I was recognized too—as the writer always perched on the stool at the counter, brow no doubt perpetually furrowed in concentration.
But the only people I really talked to much were the only people who were there almost as much as me: the baristas. They soon anticipated my weird order—coffee with a side of bacon—and on evenings I stayed late, I’d flirt with them, emboldened by a glass of wine and my thirst for human interaction. It was as good a third place as any these days, and during a time when I worked too much and saw my loved ones too little, it was truly a lifeline. But still, it was not a community.
These days, I tell everyone I know about my new library, how nice it is, how it’s a lovely place to work, how the children’s storytime hour looks fun, as if by sheer enthusiasm I can bootstrap a community into being. But when it comes to “the problem of place in America,” Oldenburg suggests, “the long-nurtured American fondness for individual solutions to problems must…eventually confront its limits.”
***
Last spring, I visited my friend Caitlin in eastern Oregon. Sitting in the living room of her beautiful old farmhouse, she tells me she’s joined the board of her small town’s public library, a place she and her toddler visit nearly every day. It is staffed by one part-time miracle worker of a librarian who puts up a window display for Pride month and makes sure the pantry is well-stocked in the summer for kids who don’t get enough food at home. Earlier in the day, as we trailed her two-year-old while he ran, barefoot and bare-bummed, in circles around their yard, she told me about a recent evening: Outside after dinner, she and her partner were puttering in the garden, when her son began to cry. “I want to play with kids!” he wailed. She knows the feeling. On a previous visit, she’d described new motherhood: “Sometimes I look around and think, There should be more people here.”
Now, as she talks about her library, what it means to have a place nearby where her son is doted on by older kids and she can chat with other adults, I tear up. Not because I know anything about the isolation of parenting a small child or living in rural 21st century America or parenting a small child in rural 21st century America. But because I recognize the urge to gather up tiny embers of community and—gently, a little desperately—blow.
You've been gone from this newsletter too long! :-)
I resonate so much with what you wrote about public libraries; it trully makes me wonder what a holistic public space ecosystem could look like in our cities. What if city planning started treating these 'third places' as essentiall infrastructure for cognitive well-being and genuine civic connection, perhaps even applying some smart urban data analytics to optimize their design and reach?