or: How the Third Place Became Our Undoing

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’m in college and choose not to be plastered from five o’clock onwards, but I spend far too much time in coffee houses. I like having somewhere to go that offers just the right mix of elements for me to relax: a bit of background noise, comfy seating, eclectic people, and, above all else, enough caffeine to keep me awake and wired for several days. I go there to get work done, to people-watch, to meet the folks I’ve been watching, to meet up with friends, pretty much any of the myriad of things that one can do at a coffee house within the range of legality.

However, there’s something I’ve noticed as of late, and it’s a bit of a disturbing trend to me. The mentality, nay, the lifestyle, of the modern American coffee house appears to be dying, or, at the least, being sterilized.

But, before I get ahead of myself, what exactly is it about the coffee house that causes so many people to waste hours on end within their darkened, stuffy walls?

It may have something to do with the concept of the “third place.” The third place, by definition, is a place other than home or work where a person can go to relax and feel part of the community. The idea itself, coined by a faculty member at West Florida State University, is relatively young, having been conceived in early 1990.

However, it is a bit of a gloss on a Freudian concept, so one could argue that the idea of the third place is even older than that, though it was only recently given a more concrete definition:

According to Ron Grossman’s “Hangouts” in a February 1990 edition of the Chicago Tribune, “Freud held that emotional well-being depends upon having someone to love and work to do. Oldenburg [the aforementioned professor] argues that the great psychoanalyst made his mental-health list one item too short. Besides a mate and a job, Oldenburg said, we need a dependable place of refuge where, for a few minutes a day, we can escape the demands of family and bosses.”

Stephen Hunter, in his September 2002 Washington Post article “Shear Gladness,” elaborates a bit further:

“All communities — and therefore all members of communities — need a ‘third place.’ It’s not your home. It’s not where you work. Those are the first two places. No, it’s the place where you go to, um, be. “

It’s no small wonder that many people (myself included) pick the coffee house as a place to go “be.”  I think what the coffee house offers the average joe (beyond a cup of joe) is a community where people of differing worldviews can come together because they share this one thing: a love of all things caffeinated. Even the people who can’t or won’t drink coffee can get in on the fun, as a typical coffee house offers more than just a cup of coffee.

Even, gasp, decaf.

Now, Hollywood had me believing for the longest time that the coffee house was primarily the second home of the beatniks, the granola-munchers, the Kerouac-readers, the poets and bongo players, and pretty much anyone else with an affinity for black and berets looking to escape the grinding meat wheel of society. And, for awhile, my experiences upheld the stereotype. Allow me to illustrate:

I went to school outside of Lexington, Kentucky, which is home to the famous UK basketball team, more horses than people, and the Common Grounds coffee house. I was but a lowly freshman in my first semester when my resident advisor and several of my peers piled into his little Volkswagen Cabriolet and made the 30-minute trek downtown to this legendary place.

It was an interesting building to say the least: a renovated grocery store from the turn of the century. That funky old brick building had many people, most of whom were smoking or just standing around outside shooting the breeze.

It was a Friday night and Common Grounds was absolutely packed. A band had set up on one end of the main room, and was blasting trance music at levels loud enough to make my ears bleed. There were two other rooms as well, one with a large leather couch and another in the back with a tiny fireplace and many café-style tables. There was a noticeable haze in the air, and no faces were immediately recognizable to me. A couple of cigarettes glowed orange against one wall, and a man with dreadlocks standing upwind gave off the unmistakable aroma of reefer.

We gave the place a once-over and proceeded to go hang out at Wal-Mart. In case you didn’t realize, I’ve come a long way since then.

I went back more times than I could count, even trying to start a weekly caravan with my friends my sophomore year, because we came to realize that we really liked the coffee and the atmosphere.

I can remember leaving there on a night when the back room smelled more strongly of hash than usual. As we left and got in the car, we saw several police cars pull into the parking lot and several officers went inside. Thus, the “Mary Jane room” got its name.

On Monday’s open mic nights all sorts of characters took the stage, from the guy who read poetry from a tattered paperback to, and this was the most memorable, Evan and Jaron, who had been dumped by their label and were attempting to stick it to the man by giving free concerts and selling their excess CDs for five dollars each. Poetry slam, an experience in and of itself, came on the first Sunday of every month. I was in heaven.

Three years later, Common Grounds still gets plenty of business. People come and go, some for a quick shot of espresso, and others, like me, settle in for the long haul. There have been renovations to the building, too: an extra room was added, and the entire upstairs got a face-lift. Walls have been repainted in warmer colors, and several more pieces of overstuffed leather furniture were purchased to match the original couch. I still sit on the couch (where I’m actually writing this article), and bands still play, though poetry slam night is noticeably, and dare I say, glaringly, absent.

Common Grounds is different. It’s still busy, but the clientele has changed; I see far fewer people with dreadlocks and more people in business casual attire. Common Grounds, especially during the day, seems more to be the destination for business folks on lunch break than for the beatniks and poets. Even the pictures on the wall reflect it: they’re artistic, and yet, they try too hard.

I see a lot of people from my school, a small, conservative college. There are people, but no life. Hence, I say, sterile.

What happened?

I wish it were as simple as the case of another favorite coffee house, the late Bean Streets of Asheville, North Carolina. Bean Streets epitomized the romanticized lifestyle I just described, with plenty of free-thinking, drug-shooting hippie folk and enough mismatched furniture to seat their hemp-laden behinds.

It’s a shame the place was condemned. Damn those North Carolina building inspections!

No, I say it was several factors that contributed to the death of “le bon vivant caféiné.”

First, I want to bring the “third place” concept back into play. You may think that it’s a bit of a fallacy to cite the very thing that makes a coffee house exist as that which is killing it. Allow me to elaborate in slightly nerdy terms:

The third place is to our society as something like the Force is within the Star Wars universe. Not necessarily in the “penetrating all, binding us together” sense, but in the “not inherently good or bad, but can be used for either” sense. A great coffee house is one which embraces this philosophy and allows others to find sanctuary within its walls. A “bad” coffee house, for lack of a better term, is one which takes this idea and milks it for every dollar that it’s worth.

I’m sure you already know to whom I’m referring, but to those who don’t, let me say that it’s a rather large chain, a veritable McDonald’s of coffee, and its name rhymes with “farchucks.”

Oh hell, I’ll just say it: Starbucks.

Now, before you think I’m beginning anti-globalist rant, let me assure you that I’ve thought long and hard about this.

I can see that day right now: The wonderful folks of corporate PR (not even necessarily Starbucks at this point) were in a meeting, bouncing ideas back and forth, trying to come up with ways to make their chain more marketable to the average consumer. It is at this point that one of these guys, probably with a Banana Republic blazer — I bet his name was Chet — stood up and tossed Professor Oldenburg’s research on the table. They gave his idea the once-over, and I bet the dollar signs began to float before their eyes. They probably slapped him on the back and paid for his trendy vegan lunch.

What I’m saying is, the third place has become a marketing tool. Starbucks, whether or not they were the first, picked up this idea and ran with it, tripping out of their Birkenstocks along the way. You can see the strategy everywhere, from Panera Bread to Barnes & Noble. The draw of Starbucks, like any other all-American franchise, is homogeny: to recreate the same experiences and atmosphere at locations all over the country. It may be comfortable, but the problem is that it’s a shadow of the real thing. People don’t realize that they are missing out on real community.

Starbucks has made something of a bizarro third place, a shadow of the coffee utopia, which imitates but can’t capture the spirit of a real “neighborhood” coffee house. But that’s okay, because it’s just enough for the bourgeoisie to accept it and plunk down five bucks for their french vanilla lattés before surfing the Internet on their Apple laptops thanks to wireless provided by the good folks at T-Mobile. Money changed hands, and many hands were shaken. Millions of dollars went into this plan.

I admit that I’m impressed at the intensive amounts of planning that have gone into this. Their service is exemplary, and their product is passable. But it still isn’t the real thing.

Starbucks alone couldn’t have single-handedly transformed the concept of an urban coffee house. If I may tread the fine line of paranoia, I’d say the government has something to do with it.

Recent legislation enacted for the Benefit of Our Children banned smokers from enjoying the indoors with the rest of us. No longer allowed to puff away in grungy cafes, they have been banished to huddle with each other outdoors in the cold. While I appreciate not having to inhale the equivalent of a pack a day, I wonder if perhaps in our haste to protect our precious lungs, we may have gentrified the notion of the coffee house into a yuppified Pottery Barn environment. The third place is now no place.

Coffee utopia?

I remember having a conversation with a few close friends about smoking, drinking, and other unhealthy social activities. The general consensus was that people bond over their vices. The smokers know they’re carbonizing lungs and yet they share that common bond with each other. I’m not sure why, but when Common Grounds kicked out the smokers, they kicked out a part of its charm.

A person who needs a cigarette every half an hour isn’t really inclined to go to a place where he has to stop his conversation, get up, probably lose his seat, and go huddle out in the cold, only to have to elbow his way back indoors and try to find a new place to sit. He’ll probably just stay at home, grinding his beans and enjoying a cup of joe in the privacy of his own tobacco-stained living room. It’s not ideal, but hey, it beats being out in the cold, right?

The demographics have changed too. True, the smokers are gone, but also, less people smoke. For example, America is trying to combat its own obesity by becoming health-crazy. Coffee houses readily adapted to this trend with carb-friendly pastries and low-calorie coffees. The health nuts eventually got wind of this and started to make places like Common Grounds their local haunt too. Word got to their friends, the power-brokers and self-starters, who jumped on the bandwagon, having their business lunches at the café tables and on the couches we’ve come to love so much. Suddenly, the third place was a lot more crowded.

While the coffee house was supposed to be a low-key place to converse and connect, personalities began to clash. This new aesthetic pushed out the granola eaters. The only ones left to fill the empty seats were more of the trendy, more of the power brokers, and more of white bread America.

So where does that leave places like Common Grounds? To be honest, I’m not so sure. I’m not going to say that the beauty of this life has been ravaged by the Capitalist Yankee Pigs, but I do fear that the trend will fade, and a lot of these oases will dry up when the power brokers discover, I don’t know, hookah bars or something.

Or maybe the smokers will stop smoking, or the druggies will start putting their pot into brownies (sounds good with a double mocha to me) instead of directly into their lungs. Then, they’ll come back, and the poetry slam will experience a resurrection. The house music systems will start blasting Sublime instead of 80s pop and Top 40, and the natural balance will be restored. Maybe.

Having seen my favorite coffee house transform so dramatically in just three years, I can’t help but consider the gradual demise of the modern American coffee house. But, until then, I think I may just go talk to that cute girl with the nose ring who’s sitting on the couch across from me.