Coffee feelings

At 787 Coffee in Greenwich Village, the coffee is pricey but the epiphanies are free

Coffeehouses are more than places to buy coffee. The best ones are places to linger, to encounter both friends and strangers, supports for the local community as well as the local economy. In chapter 10 of his landmark The Great Good Place [DaCapo, 2^nd ed, 1999], which popularized the concept of "third places," Ray Oldenburg describes the origins of democratic coffeehouse culture in London and Vienna:

In the coffeehouse, men from all parties and stations could mingle in innocence of the old traditions. In the absence of an established press, face-to-face discussion in the permissive atmosphere of these second-story halls represented a single and vital mode of democratic participation. In the process of this unprecedented mingling, people became sensitive to one anothers’ situations and found common interests and sympathies. They soon discovered, as well, the strength of their numbers and their mutual stake in individual freedom. (1999: 189)

London coffeehouses were also centers of business entrepreneurship, and headquarters for literary lions like John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Daniel Defoe. At the same time, those coffeehouses, like pubs and bistros, could be oases for their customers, “correctives” from “whatever mental and emotional states the daily struggle induces” (1999: 184). 

The splendid courtyard at Topolska 18, Belgrade

At their best, coffeehouses are places to be, not just places to buy. Achieving this in America, however, is hindered by our car-centered design, which makes life in public into a series of errands, and/or the cost of real estate in major cities, where proprietors can’t afford the space or the time for customers to hang out. 

I was visiting coffeehouses in New York City last month when I had a flash of clarity about what it feels like to be in a coffeehouse. The first two places I went had very little seating relative to the stream of customers, clearly designed for grabbing and going rather than lingering. We did stay awhile, but I was always conscious of the preciousness of the seat I occupied. The third had plenty of seating but was messy and aesthetically unappealing. Only in the fourth was I able to linger un-self-consciously, to watch and listen to the stream of people coming in, and to write most of the blog post on Greenwich Village. Maybe it was because it was Monday as opposed to Saturday or Sunday? The counterman did describe business as “slow,” though it seemed steady to me.

Sunday morning at Brewhemia, Cedar Rapids
(truth in blogging: 15 minutes later the line was out the door)

I know some people are in a hurry, and I’m certainly not one to tell anyone how to run a business or survive in the city, but the coffeehouse experience requires enough space and the right ambience to relax, enough other customers to provide interest (and income for the proprietor), as well as good things to eat and drink.

Selection of baked goods at Cafe St. Pio

 

 

Ideally the place also should be in a walkable area, with its own footprint adding at most a small parking lot. (Come to think of it, my list resembles Jeff Speck’s criteria for walking that should be purposeful, comfortable, interesting and safe.) 

Friendliness and whimsy are bonuses. 

Men's room at the Early Bird downtown,
which space is now occupied by the equally amusing Craftd 

Although we at Coe College lament the 2020 closing of our beloved Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse, expanding our horizons just a bit to the core of Cedar Rapids gets us by my count eleven local coffee places. I patronize all eleven, because research, and am here to tell you each has its distinctive features that enhance a guest's experience. The four best of them feature:

·         Enough Space: not so big that you feel like an atom, but not so small that you can’t relax, with a warm ambience. Two of my faves are located on street corners; all have large front windows none of which face east, so there’s the right amount of natural light in the morning.

Facing northwest and southwest, Cafe St. Pio anchors a key block in Czech Village

·         Customer traffic: I don’t have data, but my hunch is that my two favorites do somewhat less business than the other two. As with the previous category, I’m groping for a sweet spot, enough to be interesting but not so much that the space can’t handle the crowd.

·         Closing time: I like my coffee breaks mid-morning, but sometimes you want to meet someone in the afternoon. 2:00 p.m. seems early to close, but it’s pretty typical of Cedar Rapids. One of my favorite four is open til 4:00, and the other, bless it, til 6:00. Three are open Saturdays, three Sundays, with earlier weekend closing times.

Craftd downtown is closed Saturdays, but open Sundays

·         Moderately priced coffee: Cheap is for c-stores, but by big city standards prices at our coffeehouses are eminently reasonable, about $3-3.50 for a 16-ounce drip coffee. (Your humble blogger likes his coffee humble as well.) Most places offer free or discounted refills as well, which encourages hanging out.

payment jar for refills at Brewhemia

For sociability, refreshment, and support for the local economy, you can't beat a good, accessible, reasonably-priced, ambient coffeehouse!

SEE ALSO:

"Coffee and Community in Belgrade," 29 May 2022

"Early Bird Cafe Closes," 8 March 2020

"Letter from Washington (V): Coffee on Capitol Hill," 2 April 2018

Jacob's Coffeehouse in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood:
cozy but not crowded

"Coffee in Cedar Rapids," Facebook note from 2011

Addison Del Maestro, "Coffee Shop Kind of Day," The Deleted Scenes, 24 May 2022

Ben Kaplan, "Downtown Cedar Rapids' Coffee Shops Ranked," Corridor Urbanism, 3 February 2019

Can my church be a third place? Can yours? Should yours??

Corridor Urbanism favors bars for meetings.
Why not a church?

The term third place entered the national vocabulary more than thirty years ago with the first publication of Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place [Paragon House, 1989], and the concept seems as popular as ever. Clearly, Oldenburg struck a nerve with his description of neighborhood gathering places lost in America's rush to the suburban model of development after World War II. The quest to recover authentic third places has been part and parcel of the back-to-the-city era that has marked the first two decades of this century.

Meanwhile, the book went to a 2nd edition in 1999 (DaCapo), and then in 2001 he edited Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the 'Great Good Places' at the Heart of Our Communities (Marlowe), in which proprietors of third places tell their stories. 

Oldenburg would rather describe third places than provide a crisp definition. The concept is complicated: The Great Good Place runs to 296 pages of text. On page 2 of Celebrating the Third Place, he does equate the term with "a setting beyond home and work in which people relax in good company and do so on a regular basis." His most common short formulation, though, is "informal public gathering places." "Conversation is the main activity," he argues (1999: 26):

Nothing more clearly indicates a third places than that the talk there is good; that it is lively, scintillating, colorful, and engaging.... The persistent mood of the third place is a playful one. Those who would keep conversation serious for more than a minute are almost certainly doomed to failure. (1999: 26, 37)

This conversation must cross friend groups to qualify fully:  

The B.Y.O.F. (Bring Your Own Friends) tavern may initially offer a convincing illusion of a third place, particularly when it is crowded.... The illusion is one of unity, of everybody enjoying themselves together. Upon closer examination, however, one finds that there is no unity.... The individual entering alone is almost certainly doomed to remain that way. The patrons, by their choice of seating, the positioning of their bodies, the contained volume of their voices, and their eye movements indicate that invasion of their group by others is neither expected nor welcome. Nobody meanders from one group to the next. No one calls out to friends across the room. (1999: 171)

Sometimes The Great Good Place seems at war with itself, because the heyday of third places in America occurred in extremely gendered times. If you can have a men-only third place, can you slice and dice the public in other exclusive ways? Can you be a little bit inclusive? Now I'm even more uncomfortable than I was when I started writing this essentializing paragraph, but length constraints require we push on and essentialize, so essentialize we will! 

The subtitle of Oldenburg's first book is Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, & How They Get You Through Your Day. Celebrating the Third Place includes plenty of those, plus a garden store, a gym, and a photo shop. Just being a cafe doesn't make you a third place, though; he warns against those who would co-opt the popularity of the concept for their own economic gain without providing authentic community:

Developers build houses and call them "homes." They build socially sterile subdivisions and call them "communities." It's called "warming the product." It's also happening with alleged third places. Officials of a popular coffeehouse chain often claim that their establishments are third places, but they aren't. They may evolve into them but at present, they are high volume, fast turnover operations that present an institutional ambience at an intimate level. Seating is uncomfortable by design and customers in line are treated rudely when uncertain of their orders. (2001: 3)

The third places are, then, predominantly small commercial establishments: "The best places are locally owned, independent, small-scale, steady-state businesses" (2001: 4). However, people gather in all kinds of places that don't fit that description, for all kinds of reasons. Can a sports stadium be a third place? How about a grocery store? A high school? A theater group? A Starbucks? A casino? Possum Lodge? A friend's basement rec room? An online college writing center? 

What about a church? Mine had an orientation/planning meeting last weekend, and the desire to make our church a third place figured prominently in the discussion.

In chapter 2 of The Great Good Place, Oldenburg describes third places as a "leveler" accessible to the entire neighborhood and so expanding everyone's range of association; a "neutral ground" where no one whoever they are has pride of status (with the exception of well-established "regulars"); and a place where conversation is the main activity and main purpose for gathering. They are accessible at most times of day, informal so they accommodate people's home and work obligations, playful, and with a low external profile. At their core...

The first and most important function of third places is that of uniting the 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 feel at ease with everyone in the neighborhood irrespective of how one feels about them. A third place is a "mixer." (1999: xvii-xviii)

...in other words, similar to Jane Jacobs's theory of sidewalks, but one level up!

A church, however open it would like its doors to be, is constrained as an informal, public "mixer" by having a creed--though these vary widely in rigidity--and formal membership. Churches have a variety of associations for people, not all of them positive. Their main function is to hold worship services and to provide spiritual benefits to its members. Without products to sell, they rely heavily on fundraising to support paid staff, outreach ("evangelism") to increase membership, and a bewildering array of committees that require members to staff. All run counter to the playful informality of third places, which might be why those tend to be small businesses, which have an owner and employees to keep the beer or coffee flowing and the restrooms clean.

Nevertheless, I've been in a few churches over the years that have some qualities of a third place:

Wesley United Methodist Church and Foundation, Urbana IL, runs a coffeehouse that hosted a broad clientele in the 1980s when I volunteered and quaffed non-alcoholic beverages there. (The church also had a large lounge that attracted students during the week for studying or naps; at least it did during the less security-conscious '80s.)  Back then, at the risk of shocking the young people of today, there weren't coffee houses dotting the landscape, and if you wanted to go someplace near campus that wasn't a bar you had to go to the Etc. The main menu items were "wassail," a very sweet and highly-caffeinated beverage made from Dr. Pepper syrup, and "orts," a sort-of-cheese curds made from Velveeta brand sort-of-cheese. The Etc. is in one corner of a large building, and I'm not sure how many of its customers even know it is attached to a church. In my time it was only open eight hours a week (8-12 Fri/Sat), so limited on the accessibility dimension. 

Getting ready for Jazz Night, March 2018

Westminster Presbyterian Church, Washington DC, has Jazz Night every Friday and Blues Night every Monday--again, only a few hours a week, unlike a regularly-open coffeehouse or bar. Music venues are more for performance than for conversation, but at Jazz Night there are long breaks between sets when people wander all over the sanctuary/performance space to greet each other. Even more conversation can be had in the basement, where they serve delicious home-cooked food. I went there one Friday night to check it out, and after that I returned every time I could. I never attended a service at the church, though. I don't know how many people in the audience do, either, but I suspect it is a lowish percentage. What does the church get out of it? Some spillover increase in membership? Or just the joy of being a community institution?

Veritas Cafe, from their website

Veritas Church, Cedar Rapids IA, is located toward the south end of downtown Cedar Rapids, easily walkable from any of the core neighborhoods. They have been selling Dash Coffee Roasters products in their lobby for a couple years, and are currently open 7:30-3 weekdays. (They close at 12:30 Fridays.)  They have plenty of space, so it's easy to socially distance, and the open floor plan facilitates seeing other people who happen to be there. I attended one service at Veritas in maybe 2017 to see a former student get baptized, and probably won't be back, but that doesn't matter to being welcomed and feeling comfortable at the "cafe."

Each of these churches is built to the street in a walkable neighborhood--design matters!--and they have been able to provide something the neighborhood needs (a safe meeting place during a pandemic, live music, non-alcoholic "wassail") that is sufficiently impelling to overcome any reservations on the parts of attendees about whether they belong there. It's important also that each church sustains awillingness to devote ongoing space, energy, and custodial time to activities which ask nothing of attendees regarding creed or membership, and do not contribute (much) to church attendance, maintenance, or finances. 

Looser affiliations may be where the practice of church is heading in the 21st century, but not all are buying it. Notably, four people at our church's vision discussion--all men, curiously--advocated for more efforts towards increasing membership and financial contributions. There are valid reasons to pursue those goals, too, but they seem at cross-purposes with becoming a third place.

SEE ALSO:

Johnny Dzubak, "What is a Third Place and Why Do You Need One," The Art of Charm, 8 April 2015, and "Third Place, Part Two: Finding the Right Third Place for You," 15 April 2015. Dzubak has a different way of essentializing Oldenburg than I do, with more stress on individual benefits and less on community functions of third places. Nevertheless, it's an interesting take. And I wish Dzubak had been my older brother forty years ago when I really needed these life lessons!

Sara Joy Proppe, "Sit On It," Strong Towns, 21 January 2016. Houses of worship can contribute a lot to neighborhood walkability by providing places to sit in their yards.

What should go into Brewed Awakenings?

Brewed Awakenings in 2013

In March, two weeks after the closure of the Early Bird downtown, Cedar Rapids lost another of its great homegrown coffee houses, Brewed Awakenings, across from Coe College at 1271 1st Avenue SE. It appeared to be a temporary, COVID-related shutdown, but it never re-opened; in June, 'FOR SALE' signs appeared, then disappeared, and in July I happened upon some people collecting some effects they'd won at an auction no one I knew had heard about. The Early Bird ended with a party; Brewed Awakenings just slipped away in the night.

July 2020

Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse nearly made it to 20, an impressive run for a small business that testifies to the devotion of its devotees. It was founded in 2000 by Deb Witte, who also started Wit's End in Marion; for maybe 10 or 12 years Brewed was owned by the Marsceau family until it was sold to Larry and Junetta Janda. "When I'm at Coe and feel the need to get out of the office for a cup of coffee, the choice is obvious," I effused in an early post on this blog. "Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse is just across 1st Avenue and offers an impressive selection of coffee as well as a nice atmosphere." I occasionally performed here, back when they had live music, I frequently met here with the Political Science Club, and at various times it employed both of my sons and many of my students.

The building that formerly housed Brewed Awakenings is located at the intersection of 1st Avenue and 13th Street SE. Built in 1920, it is ideally constructed for a walkable neighborhood, with its front door opening directly onto the sidewalk and windows facing the street. The neighborhood is in fact nominally walkable, with a Walk Score of 77 and a Bike Score of 60. Census tract 19, in which it is located, is one of the most densely-populated in the city, and the shop is mere blocks from the two densest tracts. But except for Coe College, across 1st Avenue, a two block radius around the building has hardly any residences, and a few businesses with relatively small numbers of employees or customers, so there's not much actual walking around there. There is a lot of driving: 1st Avenue is also Business US 151 and Iowa 922, and carries about 21,000 cars a day; 13th Street is one-way north, and carries 1,950 cars per day. 

It's an 1,800-square foot building on an 8,400-square foot lot that also contains one other building that's been sporadically occupied over the years.

Vacant building at 111 13th St SE

There is some on-street parking, and a small lot accessible from 13th Street. That's a smaller footprint than the chain fast food restaurants in the area seem to need. Expansion is unlikely: to the west are two apartment buildings recently bought by Coe College, and the building across the alley to the south is home to a medical residency program. If the small parking lot between Brewed and the apartments was punched through to 1st Avenue it could conceivably be used for drive-through traffic, but that's probably a stretch.

Parking lot and potential 1st Avenue access

So the options for the corner are limited: possibly an office or another college apartment, but probably a small shop, like Brewed Awakenings or the cut-rate pizza place that was there before 2000. (Worst case scenario is someone buys it for a parking lot. Don't do it, Coe!) In contrast to 2000, any new coffeehouse would face competition: there are now two national chain coffee places in the area, and a building currently under construction is likely to be a third.

National coffee chain coming here?

Whatever goes into the Brewed space might well take advantage of the proximity to Coe College's faculty and students--in its last years, Brewed Awakenings closed at 4:30 p.m., which still seems unbelievable with all those students in search of an evening hangout--but be prepared for the four months each year when Coe is out of session.

The city might get involved in development, though I hope they won't--except to make 13th Street two-way! College Commons, a tax-incentivized mixed-use development up 1st Avenue from Coe (see Kaplan 2018 for an early reaction), crushes the surrounding properties in terms of value per acre, mainly from its two floors of apartments. But the apartments sit atop four franchise chains (Clean Laundry, H & R Block, Jimmy John's, and Scooter's Coffee), who have their main accesses to the rear parking lot not the sidewalk in front of the building. We can't beat College Commons financially, but can do better in other ways.

An older, smaller, well-worn building like the one that housed Brewed Awakenings can nurture a locally-owned small business, and depending on the occupant can help the area's walkability and, perhaps most importantly, provide a third place for the community. Ray Oldenburg's classic text, The Great Good Place, named for this short story by Henry James, makes the case for valuing places where people can be social, even across boundaries.

The first and most important function of third places is that of uniting the 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." (Oldenburg 1999: xvii-xviii)

A place that could bring together and "delight and sustain" (1999: 43) college students, MedQuarter workers, gentrifiers, and long-time residents--"virtually everybody"--would be a boon to all.

The habit of association comes easier in the city, but it does [not?] come automatically. Affiliations stemming from family membership and employment are not, of themselves, adequate to either community or grass-roots democracy. There must be places in which people can find and sort one another out across the barriers of social difference. There must be places akin to the colonial tavern visited by Alexander Hamilton, which offered, as he later recorded, "a general social solvent with a very mixed company of different nations and religions." (1999: 74, citing Carl Bridenbaugh and Jesse Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 21)

Except probably not a bar, that close to a college campus, for it is likely to take on the personality of the "horde of barbaric college students" (1999: 30) that are drawn to bars. Maybe a place where you can "have a cold one with the neighbors" (1999: xxiii) that also features live music, or artistic displays, or late-night breakfasts? Oldenburg's follow-up book, Celebrating the Third Place [Marlowe, 2001], describes an astonishingly wide variety of American third places. May the corner of 1st and 13th be the next!

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Da Capo, 2nd ed, 1999)

Appendix:

NAME	ADDRESS	LAND VALUE	IMPROVE-MENT VALUE	TOTAL TAX VALUE	ACRES	VALUE PER ACRE	TAXES ESTI-MATE
Brewed & vacant bldg	111 13th St SE	100,800	147,400	248,200	0.193	1,286,010	9,328
Via Sofia’s	1119 1st Av SE	100,800	297,700	398,500	0.193	2,064,767	14,977
Wendy’s	1314 1st Av NE	336,000	1,037,900	1,424,100	0.771	1,847,082	49,996
Irene’s Bar + apt	1323 1st Av SE	126,000	258,000	384,000	0.289	1,328,720	13,118
Arby’s	1417 1st Av SE	151,200	503,000	654,200	0.386	1,694,819	22,967
College Commons + apt	1420 1st Av NE	342,700	403,900	3,301,000	0.874	3,776,888	98,747
McDonalds	1530 1st Av NE	420,000	909,000	1,329,000	1.200	1,107,500	46,658

Urbanist existentialism?: "At the Existentialist Cafe" and other stuff I've recently read

Works discussed:
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016)
David Bosworth, The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession (Front Porch Republic, 2014)
Ben Kaplan, "I Love You, Cedar Rapids," Corridor Urbanism, 28 September 2016
Brandon Kendhammer, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago, 2016)
Katie Kennedy, Learning to Swear in America (Bloomsbury USA, 2016)
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Paragon, 1989)
Kate Wagner, "A Pictorial History of Suburbia," Welcome to McMansion Hell, 18 December 2016

Heidegger and Sartre, drinking poppy tea

I could have sworn last night I passed out in my van

And now those boys are pouring one for me

--JOSH TILLMAN, "I'M WRITING A NOVEL"

I first encountered existentialism in high school French class--L'Etranger by Albert Camus--and it was not a happy encounter for either of us. Learning an unfamiliar worldview in a foreign language magnified its apparent weirdness to this Midwestern suburbanite. In In Search of Authority (Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), Henry S. Kariel describes Camus's "ideal of the absurd man" as the ultimate realizations that we are unable to impose meaning on our lives, that "there is nothing in the end except extinction," and that "our plans are simply ours and not derived from God, History or some transcendent Rationality" (pp. 172-173). I don't know what would have happened had I adopted those realizations at age 16, but I was not willing to risk even giving them serious consideration. My high school experience probably had more in common with the unfortunate M. Mersault than I was willing to admit; simply to make it through the absurdity of each day I needed desperately to believe it would somehow make sense in the end when my efforts would pay off. So, no existentialism for me!

That lesson unlearned, I've come to urbanism with a strongly utilitarian-positivist bent. I always want to know what things are good for, what works, to see the data. When I first read Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, 1961) on how cities work and the disastrous effects of urban renewal, it was her piles of evidence that spoke to me. When Jeff Speck in Walkable City (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012, pp. 179ff.) commends one-way-to-two-way conversions because studies have shown they're better for businesses and safer for pedestrians, that speaks to me. I like books like The Smart Growth Manual (McGraw Hill, 2010) and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (Knopf, 2008) and websites like Strong Towns and Place Makers and Human Transit, and speakers like Ellen Shepard of Community Allies. Alongside the utilitarianism are the ethical concerns of my Christian upbringing, though truth be told I think my utilitarianism has influenced my religious beliefs as much or more as the opposite.

But there remains some of the urbanist message that speaks to a soul I wasn't sure I had. Thanks to Sarah Bakewell's lively and intelligent At the Existentialist Cafe, I'm thinking I might have at some level been speaking existentialism all this time without knowing it. Urbanists, take note! The story of existentialism even begins over drinks at a third place, the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris. Bakewell's biographical approach to the story highlights the conflicts among this group of philosophers as well as individual twists and turns, but one theme that runs through all of this is the quest for authentic existence. On the other side of the same coin, to be truly and fully human is to be free. Moreover--unlike the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who found his freedom in the isolation of his cabin in the woods--for most of the existentialists authentic existence required not only engagement with other people as individuals but with rectifying conditions in society. It was surely difficult to remain in a free state of consciousness while engaging publicly, if only because public action requires compromise, and they were many of them difficult people. Bakewell pulls no punches in this respect, but it's inspiring to see great minds at work getting toward the root of things amidst the noise and harangue of conventional wisdom, and then trying to live their conclusions.

Existentialists might agree on one thing: There's got to be more to freedom than driving your SUV to Wal-Mart to buy a gun. Or being able to deny your employees health insurance coverage for birth control.

In Katie Kennedy's young adult novel, Learning to Swear in America, physics prodigy Yuri Strelnikov is summoned to the United States from his native Russia to help save us from being wiped out by an asteroid. He faces threats to his freedom from governments: American security agencies have decided he's learned too much and are determined to prevent his leaving, while at home Putin's government has helped itself to credit for his advisor's research. But the biggest threat to his freedom is his own lack of authentic existence, because he's been living in a scientific bubble (to which is now added a security cordon). It's an unplanned encounter with an eccentric girl--an urbanist event that is set in a very un-urbanist parking lot--which begins his quest for himself that drives the story. "You gotta learn to live life, not just save it," she tells him on page 108.

Photo accompanying Ben Kaplan's essay. I will probably get around to asking permission soon.

The non-fictional Ben Kaplan knows this. Ben has a mind like a steel trap, and can cite the relevant studies on any urbanist topic. But at the core of his connection to his city is the authentic experience of ongoing engagement with his neighborhood:

It felt like as I grew up the city grew up with me. A futon and Ikea tables got replaced with real furniture from Mad Modern. I met people who owned their own businesses, who volunteered, who had great big dreams for what this place could be. I got to follow the first cohort of the Iowa Startup Accelerator as an embedded journalist. I’ve had two serious boyfriends while I’ve lived down here. I’ve stormed out of CSPS during intermission in anger and I’ve watched the sunrise paint the skyline pink from my balcony while I rested my head on someone’s shoulders. I have a built a group of friends whom I love and who I can’t imagine my life without. I have learned that I will never make better falafel than what I can get at Zaytoon’s.

Authentic existence through engagement with others drives Ray Oldenburg's urbanist classic on third places. Oldenburg bemoans "the lack of community life in our residential areas" (p. 4) as American counterparts of the Bec-de-Gaz fell victim to the suburban development pattern and longer work hours. (They may well be making a comeback, though, which he celebrates in a later work, Celebrating the Third Place [Marlowe, 2001].) The negative aspects of this loss are partly empirical--higher levels of individual stress including heretofore-unheard-of childhood depression, crime, marital stress and divorce--but also spiritual: "The processes by which potential friends might find one another and by which friendships not suited to the home might be nurtured outside it are severely thwarted by the limited features and facilities of the modern suburb" (p. 8). Too much structure, however willingly accepted, means a less free and less authentic existence.

David Bosworth, from his webpage

David Bosworth's book is about virtue not being, and he doesn't call himself an existentialist, but as he documents the many ways "Evangelical Mammonism" has perverted America's core principles ("virtue"), they invariably involve a gradual surrendering of engaged, authentic existence. Writing in the wake of the 2008 recession, which surely was as much a moral failure as a financial one, he dissects ways that the stories we tell ourselves obstruct us from authentic existence by pretending that the most imminent threats to our freedom aren't making our choices for us.

The problem hasn't been just a few "bad apples," nor even a mismanaged orchard on the left or the right, but the long-term revision of a cultural environment whose "moral field" we all share and for whose current ill health we are collectively, if not equally responsible. To make sense of that decline, we need to consider instead a broader set of ruling ideas, managerial decisions, and architectural designs that, taken together, have slowly revised the underlying logic of everyday experience and so, too (if often cryptically), our conventional beliefs about the good, the true, and the beautiful. (p. 2)

We have medications to combat sadness (ch. 4) and aging (ch. 7) which may not make us feel any happier or younger but surely are making some people richer when we buy them. Disney World (ch. 3), nostalgic political ideologies (ch. 5) and various stripes of electronic media (ch. 8) all peddle fantasies of how good life could be when purged of the messiness of other people.

The virtue of [Disney's] moral logic depends, finally, on the truth of its Mammonite claim that more (profits for the seller, consumption for the buyer) must equal better. It requires that we agree to believe in the Magic Moment and in the Fable of Innocence, and that we heed the crooning voice of its animated conscience that "no request is too extreme." (p. 77)

 And so much manufactured noise penetrates public spaces, like the banks of televisions in the airport lounge where he tries to read, that the clear message is "THANK YOU FOR NOT THINKING" (p. 17).

Swiped from www.mcmansionhell.com

Urbanists trying to mitigate the suburban experiment will note the marketing of housing developments similarly elevated consumption at the expense of virtue: clean, leafy and safe spaces in which you could build your dream house with its dream den and dream television. The Federal Housing Authority and local zoning, as well as official eagerness to flatten neighborhoods to make room for interstate highways, bear a lot of responsibility for the suburban development pattern we've inherited (Wagner). But a lot of people were eager to buy what they were selling. (And, I've been finding, are pretty defensive about how what they've bought is responsible for the state of the world.)

The struggle for free, authentic existence also goes on in the predominantly Muslim sections of northern Nigeria, where Brandon Kendhammer did the fieldwork documented in Muslims Talking Politics. His interviewees are voting to impose Islamic law on themselves, seemingly an irrational choice from a Western perspective. Yet these Nigerians are working out in their political conversations what it means to be both democratic and faithful to Islam. While rejecting a society unmoored from what Bosworth calls "virtue," they also reject the more imminent threat to their freedom represented by the would-be totalitarians of Boko Haram. (See chapters 6 and 7. By the way, Kendhammer's early chapter bring Americans up to speed on political Islam, particularly shariah law which has been made a bogeyman in our security policy discussions. You're not thinking freely if you don't understand what you're being made to be afraid of.) Kendhammer concludes: "Based on the evidence I've gathered here, what Nigeria Muslims seem to want from a reconstructed system of Islamic law is not (with the exception of Boko Haram's small community of participants and supporters) the creation of an 'Islamic state' governed according to some harsh reimagining of the Arabian past but a political and legal system that renders the outcomes of a new and unstable democratic government a little less uncertain and a little more just" (p. 22).

The threat to freedom in the West does not come from radical Islamists--although, just to make sure, some state legislature (Oklahoma?) has recently barred the use of shariah in the state's legal system. Our Boko Haram is a more subtle enemy, the cultural messages that seduce us away from seeing the probability that our freedom--our most authentic human experience--lies outside the gates, physical or psychic, that we've bought for ourselves. We can invite people into our homes, however remote their location, but a hand-picked group of friends in a private setting is hardly all there is to life. In the gospels of the New Testament, the risen Christ almost always appears to people outside of their safe spaces (outside an Empty Tomb, after a long night of fruitless fishing, on the roads to Emmaus and Damascus). Can it be that authentic engagement with others, like authentic engagement with God, also requires us to get out of spaces where we think we are in control? Our consciousness needs to be free from government coercion, but also from seduction by commercial power, and maybe most of all from our own desire for comfort! And from ambient noise.

Bakewell shows us the existentialists didn't agree on much, changed their minds a lot, and were often wrong. That's all okay, as long as we take on the strenuous work of asserting our free consciousnesses against corporations who are selling us individualism and politicians who are selling fear. That's a project for each individual, but implies a role for government in removing those barriers (one-way streets, lack of sidewalks, exclusionary zoning, commercial policies that disadvantage small businesses, and so forth) to walkability, which is prerequisite to engagement with others.

MORE ON EXISTENTIALISM:
"Existentialism," The Cry, http://www.thecry.com/existentialism/
C.S. Wyatt. "The Existential Primer," http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/exist.html

Answer me these questions three

A busy week, culminating in a trip to Skokie, Illinois, for the Midwest Writing Centers Association meeting, kept my mind occupied away from bloggable topics. So, three brief questions that occurred to me while I listened to people talk about college writing centers:

1. How difficult is it to find open spaces in an urban environment? My student Caleb, who is studying off campus in Chicago this semester, said one thing he misses about Cedar Rapids is how easy it is to get out of the city. Chicago has, thanks to its early planners, a run of public space along the lakefront, but that's often crowded, and how accessible it is depends on where you're starting from. I visited the Skokie Public Library for the first time, and noticed that there are very few tables. Plenty of chairs, many of them plush, but few places on which to set papers. I need to compare the new Cedar Rapids library next time I'm there. That night, Caleb and I had dinner at the Heartland Cafe, which has removed most of the shelves from its "general store." Both of these create more space in the rooms. Maybe this is connected to a widely-felt need for more open space.

The "general store" room at Chicago's Heartland Cafe used to look like this,

(swiped from foursquare.com)

2. Is there an ethic or unwritten law governing non-commercial use of commercial third places? One of the best sessions I attended at the conference was a presentation by four consultants from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Writing Studio. Their presentation drew heavily on The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, which I have discussed in an earlier post. The Writing Studio aims at being a third place on campus for students, more hangout than tutoring room, and from all accounts they've succeeded. One of the presenters fondly recalled another third place, a coffee shop in his home town where he and his friends would gather after high school. They never purchased anything, nor did they cause trouble. They just hung out on the coffeehouse patio and talked. He reported the owner would threaten every month or so to kick them out, but never did. Oldenburg says in Celebrating the Third Place (Marlowe, 2001), "The best places are locally owned, independent, small-scale, steady-state businesses" (p. 4). Businesses need to make sufficient profit to stay in business. It seems in this story that the owner was being unusually forbearing, and that the teens should occasionally have made some purchases, but is there a line that shouldn't be crossed?

(Paper consultation at the UMKC Writing Studio, from UMKC website.

Putting green is not visible.)

3. Can there be virtual third places? UMKC does some consultation virtually, by e-mail and Skype. As the presentation went on, they discussed how they were trying to use social media to become a virtual third place. This is a phenomenon not considered by Oldenburg, whose books were published before social media became widespread. I would think not... the shared characteristics of the third places Oldenburg describes are (my list):

• local, easily accessible from home, preferably on foot;
• comfortable, where you could drop in by yourself and feel welcome;
• relaxed i.e. you can stay as long as you wish, spending (if it's a business) some but not a huge amount of money; and
• possessing a steady clientele, so that when you drop in you're sure to encounter people you know.

I suppose all of these do apply to virtual encounters, particularly if your computer's in your basement or your bedroom where you can stay as long as you want for free. Yet I think something is missing if you're not encountering humans in the flesh. And unless you find a quote from Oldenburg that proves me wrong, I'm claiming him for my side.

Third Places in the City of Five Seasons?



Ray Oldenburg's book, The Great Good Place (Paragon House), was published in 1989. Much of its social commentary has dated, but its central message not only endures, it seems to have inspired a movement.

Oldenburg argued then that America was suffering from the loss of casual gathering places, such as the neighborhood taverns, corner stores, soda fountains and coffee shops that had been been a key part of American life prior to World War II, and are still found in much of Western Europe. He coined the phrase third place, referring to the "great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work" (p. 16). Personal benefits of third places (ch. 3) include an accessible set of friends, spiritual uplift, an improved and broader perspective on humanity, and the opportunity for novelty. Social benefits (ch. 4) include a forum for free association, gentle social control, "fun with the lid kept on," and modulated political discussion. Do folks even know how to do that anymore?

Such places have disappeared with the urban neighborhoods that supported them, as Americans live farther from work, work longer hours and organize their children's lives to a fault, and as commercial establishments emphasize profit and fast service. In newer areas they're often prohibited by zoning ordinances that tightly segregate residential and commercial uses. The loss of third places, Oldenburg goes on, has led to higher levels of individual stress including heretofore-unheard-of childhood depression, crime, marital stress and divorce, and the loss of public/community life that engages and sustains us. Don't even start him on the Internet--because this book was published in 1989, he has more to say about shopping malls than online gaming or social media. But it's not hard to imagine him including them in his diagnosis.

Oldenburg's book has a definite "what's-wrong-with-America-today" feel to it, but he concludes on a hopeful note. It's vaguely hopeful, but it's hopeful. He is sure that our need to associate is fundamental, and that it will eventually win out over the forces that isolate us. He quotes approvingly from Patrick Goldring's The Broilerhouse Society (New York: Heybright and Talley, 1969, p. 216):

I believe the human instinct towards real community and dignity will survive any processing and will assert itself in a crisis. Sooner or later there will be a check in the seemingly inexorable movement towards ant-like humanity, organizing for organizing's sake.

Tangible signs of hope emerged by 2001, when Oldenburg published his follow-up volume, Celebrating the Third Place (Marlowe & Co.). After a brief introduction, he presents first-person experiences of 19 third places, nearly all of them local businesses. They include taverns, coffeehouses, and restaurants, as well as a garden store, a gym and a photo shop. Many of the accounts are written by the entrepreneurs themselves, who describe how they self-consciously aimed to create community gathering places as well as profit-making establishments.

Just being a coffeehouse or a bar doesn't make you a third place. Oldenburg's introduction cites examples of establishments that claim to be third places but are not: a chain of "neighborhood" restaurants that are found in congested strips, a "friendly diner" that's anything but, a chain of coffeehouses that "are high volume, fast turnover operations" where "Seating is uncomfortable by design and customers in line are treated rudely when uncertain of their orders" (p. 3).

What makes a third place thirdy? Not all the establishments in the book share all of these characteristics, but ideally they are (my list): local, easily accessible from home, preferably on foot; comfortable, where you could drop in by yourself and feel welcome; relaxed, meaning you can stay as long as you wish, spending some but not a huge amount of money; and possessing a steady clientele, so that when you drop in you're sure to encounter people you know. The combination results in spontaneous social encounters, which in turn bring the benefits to individual and society listed above. Oldenburg adds "The best places are locally owned, independent, small-scale, steady-state business..." (p. 4). This addresses my question from an earlier post--Are local businesses really better than franchises?--by saying third places traditionally drew most of their business from a three-block radius, which would generate too little income for a chain to flourish. That's not all the story, I'm sure, but it's a start.

The third places profiled in Celebrating the Third Place may have established some beachheads, but they face a lot of obstacles. Oldenburg notes that governments all over America have for decades practiced unifunctional zoning, which means most residential areas don't have commercial establishments anywhere nearby. Where do the third places go? They have trouble competing for price with incorporated chains. In most areas, people spend the time between work and home commuting from one to the other, leaving them with no "community time." And however much we might crave community, it's hard to break the 70 years' habit of staying at home, especially when our homes are bigger, farther from the third places, and possess prodigious home entertainments systems, fitness centers and bars.

Cedar Rapids is the City of Five Seasons, because our size obviates the typical urban commute. Even so, I don't know if there's a lot of third place behavior here. There are certainly opportunities: the coffeehouses around town are friendly and outside of downtown Cedar Rapids seem oriented to long-term occupancy. (To be honest, I spent a lot of time in downtown coffee shops during my sabbatical, and even there never once felt hassled or hustled.) Some of them, like Wit's (formerly Witte's) End and Tatyana's, close at 2 p.m., which rules them out as third places for working people. I don't spend much time in bars, but have found two that seem oriented to neighborhood third place behavior. At our old house we used to walk to the nearby Tic-Toc (600 17th St NE), which welcomes children and has good beer on tap. The waiter got to know our orders, or at least Jane's, because she always got Blue Moon, and I could never make up my mind. Of course I was bringing my own company. The last few months I've attended a jam session at Little Bohemia (1317 3rd St SE), in a hardy 19th century building with a friendly host and a local beer (Roller Dam Red) I've never found anywhere else. It has at least the potential to be a neighborhood hangout once New Bohemia gets established. [Here is a video tribute to Little Bohemia after it was wiped out by the 2008 flood. It reopened in 2010.] Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, Tic-Toc, Little Bohemia and Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse are all accessible by pedestrians directly from the sidewalk, without having to cross a parking lot.

Another obstacle to the success of third places that Oldenburg doesn't consider is whether after 70 years out of practice we still know how to behave in them. I know I don't. Whenever I go out for coffee by myself, I always bring work to do. Last week at Brewed Awakenings I saw a colleague and a former student, both sitting by themselves. I greeted them both, but then settled in with The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. I assumed they were busy as well, and if I did decide to cast the early Greeks to the winds either of my acquaintances would find my joining their table an intrusion. If third places are going to do their stuff, we need to come with the expectation of spontaneous meeting and the anticipation others will welcome our company.