Everything but the Coffee (16 page)

In search of that elusive third place, I went back to the busy wedge-shaped Starbucks on Dupont Circle I had visited in DC before I talked with Philadelphia reporter Alfred Lubrano and declared Starbucks “a perfect third place.” This time it was a crisp but comfortable January night. Again, a diverse crowd of people came and went and kept the store packed. Students sat behind laptops and stacks of papers. Friends talked to friends. Businessmen barked instructions into cell phones about delayed orders and discounts. Lovers whispered to each other. A few customers exchanged hellos and the occasional “How are you?” with the employees. But no one talked with anyone they didn’t seem to already know or hadn’t come there to meet. None of the talk was addressed to anyone else. For my part, I couldn’t find a way to enter a dialogue with anyone.

I left and came back the next day. Again the place was crowded and thick with chatter. I looked around, but I didn’t recognize anyone from my other visits. Still, this time I was determined to talk to someone. I sat on one of the comfy chairs in the back of the room. My knees just about touched the knees of the guy next to me. I made eye contact with him. But not a word—a nod, but not a word. I suppose I should have said hello, made a comment about the Tony Hillerman mystery he was reading, but I didn’t know how to start the conversation. Or maybe I knew— and he knew—not to talk at Starbucks. We had been trained into silence, into recognizing the coffee shop as a place with boundaries. If you are there by yourself, you are off limits. I went back to the Dupont Circle Starbucks again later that day and the next day. Never did I find a conversation that I could easily—for me—join in. Again, maybe I should have tried harder.

Not long after my very unscientific and unsuccessful Washington-based third place experiment, I went to a Philadelphia Starbucks and pulled out my copy of Ray Oldenburg’s
The Great Good Place: Cafes
,
Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
, the book where he first introduced the term
third place
. Reading it again and thinking about my own Starbucks experiences, I realized that Howard Schultz had cited and put into practice only part of the third place idea. Third places certainly function, Oldenburg says, as spaces to hang out between work and home, something Schultz and other Starbucks officials point out all the time, but they remain, the sociologist insists, so much more. For starters, they are idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind hangouts. Each has its own feel and decor. Uniqueness gives them value to customers and gives them the chance to become agents of cohesion and community. But, again, it is the talk that happens in these quirky third places that matters. Oldenburg is not simply romantic for a lost urban past of mom-and-pop corner stores and manly neighborhood taverns, although he can come off this way at times. To him, third places serve not just as refuges or hideouts from the world or as steady producers of weak ties, things that Starbucks does quite well. They are not about the individual; they are about the collective. They are not about passive participation; they are about active engagement. This is key for Oldenburg, just as it is for Anderson. Like cosmopolitan canopies, third places perform a vital public service: they bring people together who would not come into contact with one another in any other setting. They do this not just for commerce but also for the larger social good.

Not long after I reread his book, I went to talk with Oldenburg. Thin and graying, with a bad back that made him move slower than he might have for his age, the retired professor blended into the early-morning crowd at a Pensacola pancake house. Starbucks, he told me, had once asked him to work for the company. He turned down the offer only to have an executive lecture him in the back of a limo about the true nature of third places.

While Oldenburg admitted that Starbucks has done some “good things,” he scoffed at the notion of Starbucks as a third place. “It is an imitation,” he said as he took a bite of his ham and eggs, adding, “It’s all
about safety for them.” Fully realized and functioning third places, he insisted, must have wide-open doors, a whiff of danger, and a hint of uncertainty. They must value easy access for everyone over predictability. In Oldenburg’s mind, owners play a key part in creating the unique, transformative character of a third place. Standing behind the bar or the counter day and night, they are a constant presence, not a shift worker like a Starbucks barista, fit into a complex and ever-changing schedule. More important, the owners set the tone for the place through their jokes, political commentary, wall hangings, jukebox choices, and gruff or gentle gestures. They welcome strangers and bring them into the community by introducing them to the regulars. And they don’t do this for money alone; they do it for themselves, out of a desire for social connections and in service to their town or neighborhood. “Would Starbucks,” Oldenburg asked me, “give a guy who is down on his luck a job?”

Essentially, Oldenburg continued, third places are conversational zones, places to talk freely and openly, sound off and entertain, experiment with ideas and arguments. With its “overriding concern for safety,” predictability, and reassurance, Starbucks “can’t achieve the kinds of connections I had in mind,” Oldenburg concluded.

Beau Weston is also skeptical about Starbucks’ third place claims. Like Oldenburg, Weston is a sociologist. He teaches at Centre College, a tiny, academically rigorous private school in rural Kentucky, perhaps most famous for hosting the 2000 vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Over the last couple of years, during the school’s J-term—a short session of courses between fall and spring semesters—Weston has offered a class with readings from Oldenburg and Habermas on coffeehouse culture and the making of public spaces. When the coffeehouse works the way it ideally should, it is, according to Weston, “a place in which strangers can talk to one another” and debate the issues of the day. When Weston conjures up this image, he uses the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse as his model. Every day, shop-keepers and bankers, ditch diggers and lawyers—just about anyone— came to these places for coffee. There were certainly gender filters at
work at the coffeehouse, but few class filters. Everyone sat next to every-one else, and together they talked business and heard the latest news. Someone would literally read aloud from the papers. Because the coffee cost only a penny and because the coffeehouse served as an informal place of learning, observers dubbed these institutions “penny universities.” When the newspaper readers finished, the noisy, cantankerous debate started. Intellectuals damned the government. Conservatives damned the intellectuals. And wits spread rumors and gossip and made fun of everyone. Over time, the coffeehouse, as a result, became a gathering spot for men from all walks of life, but also a sort of classroom— not just for sharing ideas but also for learning how to discuss and debate pressing issues with strangers.
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“Informed men, some educated and some not,” Weston continued, “would come together and talk about stuff”—literature, poetry, the economy, and politics. “Having a place to do that enriches a culture. It takes us out of the cocoon of private life and into the public world. Cafes are important for creating a public life, particularly in a democracy.”
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At the center of the coffeehouse world stood the “Coffee House Man.” He is both a maven and a connector. In his “dark” history of coffee, journalist Antony Wild described this figure, who in many ways resembled Oldenburg’s chatty counterman and a more intellectually engaged version of Sam, the bartender from
Cheers
, as “energetic, self-motivated, political, practical, reformist, well-connected, cultured, and philanthropic.”
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Part teacher, part showman, he brings people together, starts conversations, and keeps things rolling. He made the coffeehouse of old hum with talk, but he also made it a broadly civic institution.

As the coffeehouse crossed the ocean and moved into the twentieth century, it took on other forms and other traditions. By the 1950s, mods in bright jackets and motorcycle boots and beatniks in baggy work pants and dark sunglasses took over Greenwich Village, North Beach, and London coffeehouses. As cool cats like Charles Bukowski read prose poems over a Charlie Parker soundtrack, beret-wearing hipsters clicked their fingers and sipped espresso from chipped porcelain cups. But here,
too, talk linked politics to art, cool to civic life. As the singers sang and the audiences talked, they attacked Cold War conformity and the sub-urban ideals of heterosexuality, monogamy, and keeping up with the Joneses. They talked politics without discussing presidents and senators, foreign policy and congressional appropriations. They emphasized freedom and pushing past social constraints. Jazz played as the sound-track of the 1950s coffee shop. By then outside the mainstream, jazz— specifically, bop—stood out for its spontaneous, improvisational splendor and sparseness. The abstract art hanging on the walls echoed these musical themes. Rejecting straight lines and conventional representation, it also spoke the language of freedom and individualism. All this happened at the coffeehouse.

The 1960s brought in the GI coffeehouses. These places also turned on politics and talk. Set up near military bases, these spare storefront operations were usually run by radicals and pacifists trying to educate soldiers about the Vietnam War—or, more accurately, to get them to oppose the war.

BOWLING ALONE

Fast-forward to the late 1980s. Faith Popcorn calls herself a futurist even though she seems better at observing the sociology of the moment than predicting what will happen next. Beginning in the “government is the problem” Reagan years, she noticed that upper-middle-class Americans— Starbucks’ early adopters—were “hunkering down,” “holing up,” and “hiding out under covers.” She called this trend “cocooning” and defined it as “an impulse to go inside when it gets too tough and scary outside.” Everything from “rude waiters and noise pollution to crack-crime, recession, and AIDS,” Popcorn maintained, led to this “heavy duty burrowing.” Worried about their personal safety and the uncertainty around them, people stayed home and avoided the few third places left in the United States. At the same time, Republican-proposed budget cuts pulled government funding for libraries, parks, schools, and
arts programs. Along the way, we lost many of our most vital public spaces, the sites where we learned the third place skill of talking to strangers and feeling secure doing so.

Everyday purchases highlighted what Popcorn observed. Mail-order business tripled over the decade of the 1980s, reaching half a billion dollars a year. Indicating again that people were staying inside, sales of Joe Boxer pajamas, a perfect complement to the stay-at-home life, increased by 500 percent.
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More ominously, Americans also built a vast landscape of exclusion to protect themselves from their real and imagined fears of crime, drugs, and disease. The wealthy moved into gated communities and fortified their homes with motion-sensitive security systems and antisnooping devices. They drove Hummers and other military-like vehicles to work and on vacations. The slightly less well-off settled miles from downtown and any form of public transportation in homes where the most conspicuous architectural feature was a steel-doored garage with an automatic opener.
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That way, cocooners could go from their SUVs and minivans into their houses without ever stepping foot on a street or seeing a neighbor or, worse, a stranger.

Robert Putnam famously measured the retreat from the public in another way. With bar graphs and pie charts, he showed, as mentioned in the introduction, that by the start of the Starbucks moment in the early 1990s, Americans had stopped hosting potlucks, going to PTA meetings, joining ethnic and neighborhood associations, writing law-makers, and turning out to vote. Bowling, in particular, revealed for him the troubling patterns of the loss of civic and social life. More and more of us went bowling, but far fewer of us belonged to leagues. We were, Putman lamented, “bowling alone.”
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A strange thing that no one has really talked about happened just as Popcorn pointed her finger at the cocooning trend and Putnam released his statistics on the decline of civic life. Crime rates dropped, and as soon as they did, people started to come out of hiding. They backed their Explorers out of their garages and went downtown for dinner and a show. Some joined book groups at Borders and salons sponsored by the
Utne Reader
. Others took up Bible studies and Sundays at megachurches. Still others seemed willing to bowl again or just have a cup of coffee out-side the house, but before they went anywhere, they wanted to make sure they were safe and that the people around them were safe. That emphasis on safety, on knowing at a glance that you were OK, became the perquisite for all out-of-the-house places. Only when middle-class types could easily find reassuring clues were they willing to leave the protections of the landscapes of fear. But still the willingness to go out at all points to a trend that Popcorn and Putnam had missed. What the tentative steps from home showed was that many upper-and middle-class Americans didn’t, in the end, like bowling alone or cocooning all that much. They wanted contact, belonging, and a renewed sense of community. Some turned to the Internet for these things, but lots of others went to Starbucks.
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•  •  •

Nanyce Green helped design the first American Girl Place store in Chicago and then the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. In 2005, she reminded a group of architects and city planners gathered at Harvard that America had “lost many of [its] community places.” “There are not enough places to go and feel safe,” she complained. By providing this sense of security, Starbucks had become, she believed, our needed “community place.” What Green didn’t note in her rather upbeat take on the corporate coffeehouse was what was actually going on at Starbucks. She saw the people in the stores, like I had, and assumed that they were there together. But she didn’t grasp just how far latte drinkers had drifted from the practice of community and how their ideas about safety got in the way of really coming together, how all of these things combined to create the appearance of togetherness more than actual togetherness, and how Starbucks had turned this illusion into a valuable commodity for her and for the company.