The Great Good Place (Berkshire Edition)

Copyright 1989, 1997, 1999, 2023 by Ray Oldenburg

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Earlier editions of this book were published by Marlowe & Company (1989), by Paragon House, and by Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, under ISBN: 9781569246818.

Berkshire Edition 2023

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61472-097-3

ISBN (hardback): 978-1-61472-103-1

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-61472-099-7

ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-61472-100-0

A CIP record for t his book is available from the Library of Congress.

To Judith and our children Jennie, Maren, and Carl

Contents

About the Berkshire Reprint Edition, 2023

Preface to the First Edition, 1989

Preface to the Second Edition, 1999

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Part I

CHAPTER 1: The Problem of Place in America

CHAPTER 2: The Character of Third Places

CHAPTER 3: The Personal Benefits

CHAPTER 4: The Greater Good

PART II

CHAPTER 5: The German-American Lager Beer Gardens

CHAPTER 6: Main Street

CHAPTER 7: The English Pub

CHAPTER 8: The French Cafe

CHAPTER 9: The American Tavern

CHAPTER 10: Classic Coffeehouses

PART III

CHAPTER 11: A Hostile Habitat

CHAPTER 12: The Sexes and the Third Place

CHAPTER 13: Shutting Out Youth

CHAPTER 14: Toward Better Times . . . and Places

READERS GUIDE

About the Berkshire Reprint Edition, 2023

As we emerge from several years of pandemic isolation, Ray ­Oldenburg’s ideas about third places are more relevant than ever before. While there will soon be a new version of this book, co-authored by Karen Christensen, some readers will value this reprint of the original, a book that changed lives and influenced planners and entrepreneurs around the world.

Ray addressed Korean readers with this short preface in 2019:

In my country the course of urban development has failed to accomplish that goal. For the past several decades, urban development in the United States has followed the dictates of single-use zoning. Over half of us have homes in areas where nothing else is allowed. The use-value (facilities one may walk to) is zero. One must get into a car for everything. Also, life at home is totally an indoor existence. Children are seen out-of-doors only at street corners where they await school buses. Parked cars are everywhere and in such numbers as to make the overall view unpleasant. So rarely do people walk in these developments that, within more recent construction, sidewalks have been eliminated.

These conditions have prompted me to coin the term third place which so many of us seek in desperation. The home is the first place; the work lot is the second place, and neither are places in which to relax and enjoy the diversity of relationships urban life has to offer. The third place, most often a bar or coffeehouse, is where we relax and enjoy an hour or so in good company most days of the week.

American suburbs provide an excess of privacy but deny proximity to those places upon which a community life depends. Predictably, the shortcomings inherent in our suburban lifestyle have prompted people to reject it; the number of people wanting to move from suburbia into our cities grows every day. A scramble is now on to find ways to make our cities better places to live for they represent, at present, the triumph of commerce over community with tall buildings and cold streets being their dominant feature.

American culture is presently affecting that of Korea and it is my sincere hope that you good people will always see to it that those places in which you regularly meet with old friends and make new ones will remain popular, protected, and in close proximity to your homes. Their importance cannot be overestimated.

Ray Oldenburg died peacefully at home in November 2022, at the age of ninety. His last book was The Joy of Tippling, published by Berkshire.

Preface to the First Edition, 1989

MY INTEREST IN those happy gathering places that a community may contain, those homes away from home where unrelated people relate, is almost as old as I am. Children, I suspect, are instinctively attuned to the climate of human relations around them and experience an inner joy and serenity, a feeling that all is well when the adults in their lives relax and laugh in one another’s company. That, at least, was my reaction. Perhaps it was that winter evening during my fifth year, when the older cousins took me along to our town’s skating rink and deposited me amid the joyful and animated little crowd in its warming shack, that I first drank the joys of blissful public congregation. I have never since lost my appetite for it.

Subsequent training in sociology helped me to understand that when the good citizens of a community find places to spend pleasurable hours with one another for no specific or obvious purpose, there is purpose to such association. Further, the most important of the pur­poses or functions served by informal public gathering places cannot be supplied by any other agencies in the society. All great cultures have had a vital informal public life and, necessarily, they evolved their own popular versions of those places that played host to it.

To comprehend the importance of the informal public life of our society is to become concerned for its future. Currently and for some time now, the course of urban growth and development in the United States has been hostile to an informal public life; we are failing to provide either suitable or sufficient gathering places necessary for it. The grass roots of our democracy are correspondingly weaker than in the past, and our individual lives are not as rich. Thus, it is always with a sense of urgency that I write and speak on this subject.

I began to take an active professional interest in the topic about ten years ago. I first aired my perspective at a regional sociology convention in 1977. In 1980, a colleague and I collaborated on an article written in the popular vein that was subsequently reprinted in at least nine other periodicals and books. In 1983, we published a longer, more scholarly version in a professional journal. Audience responses were gratifying, but there was also frustration in attempting to make the case within the brief space that articles permit. For the past six years, I’ve wrestled with a book-length treatment, which this topic surely deserves. After a series of abortive beginnings, it became clear to me that I would not be content to write only for other sociologists nor would I wish to offer solely a description, which good sociology often is.

I wanted to make the case for the informal public life and the Great Good Places essential to it. There is an urgency implicit in the broad­ scale destruction of these kinds of places in the United States; we are inadequately equipped even to defend the idea of them. The impor­tance of informal meeting places is not deeply ingrained in our young culture, nor is the citizen suitably fortified for a rational argument in their behalf. Even those who would intuitively understand and endorse everything I have to say (and they are many) have too little verbal ammunition. In a world increasingly rationalized and managed, there must be an effective vocabulary and set of rationales to promote any­ thing that is to survive. I can but hope that this effort will contribute to what will have to become a popular understanding of the necessity of a vital informal public life.

I have declined the pose and language of scientific reporting and mean to promote the Great Good Places of society as much as analyze them. Like an attorney-at-law, I am defending a most worthy client who may be facing oblivion and doing so in a language the jury can understand. The jury is middle class, educated, and possessed of choices as to where and how to live. It is capable of making judgments on the matter here put before it and of acting on those judgments. Like the crafty lawyer, I’ve tried to tailor my anecdotes and illustrations so as to strike chords of response among this panel.

Only the truth will serve my client’s interests, and my decision to forego a scientific report assumes no license to play fast and loose with the facts. Several measures were employed in the attempt to represent the phenomena under discussion as they appear in the real world. In identifying the essential characteristics of informal public gathering places and their effect upon the individual and society, I made certain that each conclusion corresponded with my own considerable field experiences; that each of them had been observed and reported by others; and that each had been held up to criticism in the lecture hall. Also, a decision was made to add six chapters of real life illustration (Chapters 5 through l0), all of which confirm the basic constructions within the earlier chapters. Finally, time was on my side. In the early years of effort on the subject, many facts seem incompatible with my emerging impression of third places. It is a human tendency to want to discard or discredit, or simply forget uncomfortable facts. They are, however, friends in disguise. They are clues to a deeper understanding of the problem that confronts an investigator, but it takes time to fit the stubborn pieces into the puzzle. By current standards of scholarly production, I spent too much time on this project. Such was the nature of my subject, however, that the extra time turned out to be my best methodological technique.

Social scientists who choose to make use of this volume may recog­nize a familiar structure beneath its plain English and special pleading. The first section of the book is devoted to the creation of an ideal typical core setting of informal public life against which concrete examples may be compared. The second section offers a variety of cultural and historical (real) examples based on the best and, at times, the only accounts available to us. These afford some, and I think significant, substantiation and testing of the ideal type. The final section is devoted to issues relating to informal public life and, though my colleagues are likely to disagree with my positions or the fact that I took positions, they are not likely to dispute the relevance of the issues I’ve raised.

The considerable amount of fieldwork associated with this effort followed procedures associated with comparative analysis or those used to generate grounded theory. In keeping with that approach, I made use of supplemental data wherever I could find it.

Those wishing to read another author’s version of the third place thesis are directed to Phillipe Aries’ paper entitled The Family and the City, which appeared in Daedalus in the spring issue of 1977. Therein, one need only interpret the Frenchman Aries’ cafe in a generic sense. I stumbled across Aries’ essay toward the end of my own work and reflected on that timing. Though an early reading of his paper would have hastened the development of my own broader perspective, I was spared the inherent pessimism in his analysis.

The bulk of social scientific writing in the area of informal public gathering places consists of ethnographic descriptions that await inte­gration into more abstract and analytical efforts addressing the place and function of these centers of the informal public life of the society. Sociologists may ask themselves why so little has been done in this area since Georg Simmel’s brief essay on sociability over half a century ago. Finally, I would suggest to colleagues that the possibilities for cross­ cultural research into the quality of informal public life seem exciting. The most useful and pertinent data are always within the public do­ main, and the invitation to foreign travel should require little encour­agement. Whether the present effort serves to guide such efforts or merely encourage them makes no difference. The important thing is that this research be conducted, if only to help our nation reinstitute the kind of human association essential to all democracies.​​

Preface to the Second Edition, 1999

AS THE ORIGINAL preface accomplishes the usual purpose of such prolusions, the second affords the author the luxury of choice. Though it is tempting to recount the many and varied experiences, the rich flow of correspondence, and the kindred spirits met as a result of the pub­lication of The Great Good Place six years ago, the space allotted here may be more usefully employed.

This second preface is devoted to those readers who have more than a passing interest in the concerns this book addresses. It is primarily for those who wish to learn more and do more in behalf of community, public conversation, and civicism. It is for those who believe in a pub­lic life and the need to restore it.

Two brief additions will be developed here, both of which should enhance the utility of the book. First, I will make suggestions for addi­tional reading. Second, I will offer a checklist of the various community­ building functions of great good places which may be quickly reviewed and assessed against the strengths and deficiencies of any par­ticular neighborhood or municipality. Some of these are developed at greater length in the text proper; some are introduced here for the first time.

In the brief period since The Great Good Place was published, many books have appeared with similar themes. America seems to be under­ going a massive reassessment. In the simplest terms, we got where we wanted to go but now we aren’t happy about where we are. We have become a suburban nation-the only one in the world. Our migration from both the inner cities and the rural hinterland was, as Lewis Mum­ ford once put it, a collective effort to live a private life. We aimed for comfort and well-stocked homes and freedom from uncomfortable interaction and the obligations of citizenship. We succeeded.

As if to seal our fate, zoning ordinances were copied and enforced all over the land, prohibiting the stuff of community from intrusion into residential areas. In the subdivisions of post-World War II America, there is nothing to walk to and no place to gather. The physical stag­ing virtually ensures immunity from community.

The preferred and ubiquitous mode of urban development is hostile to both walking and talking. In walking, people become part of their terrain; they meet others; they become custodians of their neighbor­ hoods. In talking, people get to know one another; they find and create their common interests and realize the collective abilities essential to community and democracy.

It is from this perspective, this sense of the terrible costs of subur­ban development as we’ve managed it, that much of my reading and writing takes direction. Before publication of this book, I found my kin­dred spirits almost entirely in the books they wrote, and I am pleased to report that the present decade is witness to an increasing number of volumes having to do with our subject.

My recommendations for additional reading are subjective and in­ complete. They consist of the men and women who have had most in­ fluence on me and whose books, regardless of publication date, seem to me to have great contemporary relevance.

I could start with none other than Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For all the consternation she caused within ar­chitectural and planning circles, she has done a tremendous service for us all. One marvels at both the depth and quantity of her insights. Well within the Jacobs’ tradition and appearing the same year as my contri­bution was Roberta Gratz’s The Living City. Gratz’s book contrasts grass roots successes at rebuilding neighborhoods with the disasters wrought by urban renewal.

Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities is still a book worth not only owning but using as a reference work for all aspects of urban and neigh­borhood development. Gruen is the man who conceived and planned our nation’s first covered shopping mall. He came to reject the designation, father of malling because his plan was stripped down to com­mercialism only. He had envisioned a true community center.

Another volume I’ve nearly worn out is a brief and very readable lit­tle book by Wolf Von Eckardt entitled Back to the Drawing Board. Like Gruen, Von Eckardt is an advocate of citizen participation in planning and well understands that that can happen only at the neighborhood level.

The best description I’ve found on what we can learn from the old world is Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People; a richly illustrated and detailed volume on the architectural requirements of a thriving public life. It is fittingly dedicated to The Unknown Pedestrian and not one of its scores of illustrations bears any resemblance to our subdivisions.

What almost amounts to a new genre of books are those appearing in response to the places rated volumes appearing in the 1980s. Those earlier books ranked cities according to comparative numerical data on health, crime, education, etc. Recognizing that strict adherence to such criteria could lead one to take up residence in Anywhere, USA, more recent authors have intruded a most relevant question: But is it an in­teresting place to live?

Mark Cramer’s Funkytowns USA and Terry Pindell’s A Good Place to Live are welcome contrasts to the census-based, scoresheet analyses. Pin­ dell treats the dozen or so best places in the U.S. that he’s ever heard about in considerable depth. And he writes well; one almost feels as though he or she has been along on the trips. Cramer’s Funkytowns covers many more towns and cities and, as one reviewer suggested, it should be placed in the glove compartments of all rental cars.

Philip Langdon’s A Better Place to Live is a painstaking examination of how to retrofit American suburbs and when we come to the necessary matter of re-writing the building and zoning codes, this book should be one of the primers. Peter Katz’s The New Urbanism details and illustrates two dozen developments and re-developments. It rep­ resents our architects’ best attempts at recreating community. A closing essay (an Afterword) by Vince Scully deserves careful attention.

Recently appearing and already in its second printing is Richard Sexton’s Parallel Utopias which looks deeply into the thinking behind, and execution of, two notable attempts at creating community today. Sea­side, Florida (based on an urban model despite its location) and Sea Ranch, California (based on the model of a rural community) are closely examined. Sexton is a first-rate photographer who illustrates as well as he explains in this book.

A volume which catches everyone’s attention when, on my trips, I show it around is David Sucher’s City Comforts. Contained herein are many suggestions, all photographically-illustrated, as to minor surgery and modest additions which combine to make life out in the public domain more enticing, more comfortable, and more livable.

The expert in this sort of thing, of course, is William H. Whyte, and if his larger tome City seems a bit formidable, the small and highly il­ lustrated The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces will certainly seduce the reader into more of Whyte’s research which has been done with ex­ceeding care. Many urban centers have been revitalized in adherence to what Whyte has been able to report.

The political importance of great good places is wonderfully doc­umented in a book by Sara Evans and Harry Boyte entitled Free Spaces. The writers argue convincingly that such places became much more im­portant after industrialization separated home and the workplace and that they serve to preserve the peoples’ democracy against the grow­ing control of both government and the corporations.

Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites discusses the civic arts and the art of argument in addition to its main theme-that America’s professional and managerial elites have little interest in the broad mid­dle class of our society and have weak ties to nation and place. Their interest in a global economy and their tourist’s attitude toward place give us cause to both regret and combat the control they have over the rest of us.

As public life is populated with strangers more than ever before; as strangers frighten us more than ever before; and as communities nonetheless depend upon the successful integration of strangers, books about them are also recommended. Lyn Lofland’s A World of Strangers has become a modern classic. Michael Ignatieff’s The Needs of Strangers is thought-provoking, and Parker Palmer’s The Company of Strangers is a pleasure to read.

Before moving to the second part of this preface, there is another kind of reading, just now gathering momentum, that will be of special interest to those concerned with public life. I refer to civic journal­ism, or community journalism, or citizen journalism, as it is var­iously called. Though its precise goals and modus operandi are still being debated, there is a general consensus that greater citizen involvement is the desideratum.

Readers may expect that newspapers will encourage citizen partici­pation in most aspects of community development; that more level heads will be invited to present more rational and moderate discussion; that reporting will go beyond mere events and present developments against a background of trends and patterns. Developments and pro­posals will increasingly be presented in context. Newspapers are expected to be less in league with politicians and the business commu­nity than in the past, and more with a citizenry which is trying to live good lives in good cities.

The reasons for this shift in print journalism are many. Suffice it to note here that there is reason to rejoice in the fact that one of our in­stitutions is moving away from the professional elitism which ill-serves the citizens of a democracy. As newspapers begin to speak more to ordinary citizens, so also will they more often listen to them.

As indicated, the remainder of this discussion will be devoted to the community-building functions which great good places typically per­ form. Most often I refer to such places as third places (after home, first, and workplace, second) and these are informal public gathering places. These places serve community best to the extent that they are inclusive and local.

The first and most important function of third places is that of uniting the neighborhood. In many communities, the post office served this function well when everyone had a mailbox there; when everybody had to walk or drive to it; and it was kept open, by law, twenty-four hours a day. Though there was no seating, it was a place where people met and conversed, at least briefly, with one another.

Drug stores also brought nearly everyone into contact with every­ one else in the course of the average week or month. They did this because they offered so many things, beyond pharmaceuticals, that people needed. Also, they typically enjoyed a good (central) location in the town or neighborhood.

Places such as these, which serve virtually everybody, soon create an environment in which everybody knows just about everybody. In most cases, it cannot be said that everyone, or even a majority, will like everybody else. It is, however, important to know everyone, to know how they variously add to and subtract from the general welfare; to know what they can contribute in the face of various problems or crises, and to learn to be at ease with everyone in the neighborhood irrespective of how one feels about them. A third place is a mixer.

Assimilation is a function to which third places are well-suited. They serve as Ports of Entry for visitors and as places where new­ comers may be introduced to many of their predecessors. Andres Duany jokes about the man who spent two days trying to find the resident of a subdivision. His anecdote points up the fact that our post­ war residential areas are extremely hostile to strangers, outsiders, and new residents of the area. The streets are typically vacant and there are no local commercial establishments where one might stop to get directions.

There is considerable irony here. Once America became the high mobility society it now is, with about twenty percent of the population changing residence every year, one might have thought that neighbor­hoods would have been designed so that people could be integrated quickly and easily. What actually happened, however, was quite the op­posite. The more people moved about, or were moved about by the companies that employed them, the more difficult it became to pene­trate the nation’s residential areas.

The hardships involved, and they are many, are not incurred by the newcomers alone. The city and the neighborhood suffer as well when there is a failure to integrate newcomers and enlist their good services to the betterment of community life.

A one-visit Welcome Wagon is a poor substitute for the friendly tav­ern or coffee-counter where one is always welcome. The neutral ground (space upon which one is not burdened by the role of host or guest) of third places offers the great ease of association so important to community life. People may come and go just when they please and are beholden to no one. Eventually one meets or otherwise learns about everyone in the neighborhood.

In this respect, third places also serve as sorting areas. The broad scale association which they provide ultimately leads to the stuff of sociometrics. That is, people find that they very much like certain peo­ple and dislike others. They find people with similar interests, and they find people whose interests aren’t similar but are interesting nonethe­less. Third places often serve to bring together for the first time, people who will create other forms of association later on.

In true communities there are collective accomplishments. People work together and cooperate with one another to do things which in­dividuals cannot do alone. Though much of this kind of effort is in­ formal, it nonetheless requires a general understanding of who can do what; of the skills, abilities and attitudes of those in the neighborhood. Third places serve to sort people according to their potential usefulness in collective undertakings.

Related to this is the third place’s function as a staging area. In time of local crisis, people typically find it necessary to help themselves as much or more than they are helped by municipal agencies. Severe storms and other crises often require a gathering and mobilization of local citizens for the purpose of helping one another. But where? In the aftermath of hurricane Andrew in South Florida not long ago, many people emerged from the destruction feeling that need to gather with others to find out how severe and extensive the damage; to find out what was being done; to see how they could help and/or get help-but for most there was no place to assemble. Careful zoning had denied these people their third places.

Third places also provide those whom Jane Jacobs called public characters. These are people who know everybody in the neighborhood and who care about the neighborhood. These are usually store owners or operators who keep an eye on what’s happening in the neighborhood. These are the people who alert parents about what their kids sometimes get into before it is necessary for the police to do so. These are also the people likely to give newcomers their first welcome to the area.

Suburban zoning has replaced public characters with the retailers and their employees in the malls and out on the strips. The chains in which these people work thrive by killing off local commercial establishments, and the people who operate the chains do nothing for the community in the way that public characters do.

In the negatively-zoned subdivision, there rarely emerges a public character, for the means by which people might come to know every­ one are absent. If the developer’s habit of calling a house a home is something of a stretch, it doesn’t compare with that of calling a subdi­vision a community, for that is precisely what it is not.

Among the noblest of third place functions, rarely realized anywhere anymore, is that of bringing youth and adults together in relaxed enjoyment. The rampant hostility and misunderstanding between the generations, adult estrangement from and fear of youth, the increas­ing violence among youth-these and youth-related problems all have a common genesis and it is the increasing segregation of youth from adults in American society.

Raising children was easier when the parents got a lot of help from others in the neighborhood who knew the kids and not only kept an eye on them but generally enjoyed having them around. The ways in which older and younger generations teased, cajoled, chided and amused one another have almost passed from memory now, as have the lessons learned, the examples set, and the local figures admired.

With so many mothers now absent from the home, it is all the more regrettable that the family is so weakly connected (if connected at all) to the other people in the neighborhood. Where third places exist within residential neighborhoods, and are claimed by all, they remain among the very few places where the generations still enjoy one an­other’s company.

Third places serve the elderly as well. It is unfortunate that so many old and retired people find it desirable to make a final migra­tion to some senior citizen community. It is regrettable that the areas in which they worked and raised children have so little to offer them, so few means of keeping them connected to neighborhood and community.

This book has no chapter on the elderly and the retired. There was the constraint of length and I opted for a chapter on children based on my reasoning that children are ill-equipped and weakly positioned to speak for themselves.

There should be a chapter on the older generation, of course, and not just for their sake. Third places are typically places of business and their slow periods benefit from retired people who can fill the booths and chairs when others are at work or in school. Furthermore, retired people are generally more sociable and more civilized. No longer grub­bing for a living, they come to place more value on good conversation, on enjoying people just for the company they offer.

It escapes me right now, who first wrote that urban planning which meets the needs of children and the elderly will be nice for everybody, but truer words are rarely written. Several years ago, I participated in an Evaluation Study of a program for retired people in a Minnesota town of barely 7,000 people. The program was contained, for the most part, in the basements of two of the town’s larger churches.

Participation was modest in this program and enthusiasm was not high. I was there a full three days and couldn’t figure out the purpose, though everyone I talked with insisted that something important was being done for the elderly. The fourth day began with a meeting in the conference room of the town’s largest bank. When the meeting ad­journed, I held back and stepped in front of our host as he was about to leave. With just the two of us present, I confronted him with, What the heck is this all about? Taken off guard, he blurted, Well, we had to get them off the street. The important thing being done for the elderly was getting them oii.t of the way much as they did with the homeless when Atlanta hosted the Olympics.

These older folks, of course, had looked forward to sitting along the sidewalks in fair weather and to lingering at the lunch and coffee shops and taverns. Here were people most intent upon enjoying community; who now had time to enjoy communal association. The boosters however, were intent on denying them these rewards. There was no ap­preciation of that which the oldest generation contributes to commu­nities which provide a place for them.

Third places provide a means for retired people to remain in con­tact with those still working and, in the best instances, for the oldest generation to associate with the youngest.

The plight of the elderly and those on fixed incomes generally, points up another important function of third places and it is that performed by all mutual aid societies. In the convivial atmosphere of third places, people get to know one another and to like one another and then to care for one another. When people care for one another, they take an interest in their welfare; and this is a vastly superior form of welfare than that obtained by governmental programs. It is based on mutual con­sent, genuine empathy, and real understanding of peoples’ situations. Nobody is a case.

Third place regulars do for one another, as they would for blood relatives and old friends. They give things they no longer need; they loan items they still want; they do what they can to relieve hardship when it befalls one of the gang. When someone doesn’t show for a couple of days, somebody goes around to check on them.

The financial benefits in all of this are considerable. Somebody in the group fixes lawn-mowers. Someone else can handle plumbing and appliances, or knows who does it at considerable savings. Money-saving advice is forthcoming from somebody in the group who has confronted a given problem earlier on. Sometimes, alas, when the group’s collec­tive resources are found wanting, the individual is advised, Get out your pocketbook. Often, however, that is not necessary.

It was in the first Crocodile Dundee movie, I believe, that our pro­tagonist was surprised to hear that somebody paid a psychiatrist to lis­ten to his or her troubles. That’s what mates are for! was, I think, his response. The group support inherent in third place camaraderie, I’m convinced, also saves many people the expense of a professional care­giver.

This union of friends suggests another function of the third place. An individual can have many friends and engage them often only if there is a place he or she can visit daily and which plays host to their meetings.

Friends met in numbers create something of a festive mood for all. Interaction is relatively easy as one is required to contribute only his or her share of the time. Laughter is frequent where many friends gather. In their company, the competitive successes and the enervating stresses of the mundane world are put on hold.

Amid this lengthy enumeration of third place functions, it may be well to point out that the fundamental motivation for this kind of be­longing is neither personal advantage nor civic duty. The basic mo­tivation; that which draws people back time and again is fun. It is a lamentable fact that so many Americans, when they see the gang heavily engaged in solving the problems of the world consider them merely to be frivolously wasting time.

The fun function of third places is better seen, perhaps, as the en­tertainment function. That entertainment has deteriorated almost en­tirely into an industry in the United States is a great pity. We take it passively; we take it in isolation; and we frequently find it boring.

In third places, the entertainment is provided by the people themselves. The sustaining activity is conversation which is variously pas­sionate and light-hearted, serious and witty, informative and silly. And in the course of it, acquaintances become personalities and personali­ties become true characters-unique in the whole world and each adding richness to our lives.

The major alternative to participatory entertainment is television which really isn’t interesting enough to gamer all the blame heaped upon it. The critics usually overlook the lack of alternatives to this medium. How many Americans having surfed all the channels and, bored by it all, wouldn’t like to slip on a jacket and walk down to the corner and have a cold one with the neighbors? Ah, but we’ve made sure there’s nothing on the corner but another private residence in­deed, nothing at all within easy walking distance.

We might remind ourselves of the essence of the so-called Joie de vivre (joy in living) cultures. That essence is their ability to entertain themselves in an abundance of public places where they may do so daily and at little cost and no discomfort. We may sneer at their simple ways; at their lack of technological gadgetry; and at the fact that their dwellings are more humble than ours. But when all is said and done-they enjoyed life and gave human relationships higher priority than making a buck.

America’s growing problem of automobile congestion suggests a re­lated function of third places-where locally situated. A third place to which one may walk allows people to get out of the house without getting into a car and contributing to traffic congestion. Unfortunately, our census takers log only the commuting use of our roadways. Even casual attention to local driving conditions will reveal that our roads are crowded during most daylight hours and not just at rush hours.

Though we live in as large and as well-stocked houses as we can af­ford, there is frequent need to escape from them. The only real means for most is by car and the only realistic escapes for most is the malls and the strips where they are expected to spend their consumer dol­lars. Americans spend three to four times as much time shopping as Europeans and much, if not most, of the difference has to do with a lack of alternatives. We have denied ourselves the means of friendly and cost-free association in our neighborhoods. In any total analysis, Walmart and McDonalds are much more expensive