A good corner tavern or all-night coffee shop should be a joy forever. Unfortunately that elementary truth eludes architects and developers and their myopia, notes Ray Oldenburg, is making all of us poorer. Not in dollars and cents, but in something less tangible yet ultimately more valuable. For Oldenburg, that is a personal lament as well as professional judgment.
In late adolescence, he graduated to the Red Feather Bar. Now Oldenburg lives in a suburb near Pensacola, Fla. That was a rhetorical question. Sigmund Freud held that emotional well-being depends upon having someone to love and work to do. Oldenburg 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.
In that kind of psychological Eden, an easy-going conviviality allows us to be temporarily amnesic to our woes and shortcomings. Oldenburg is convinced that many problems of contemporary society-alienation in the workplace, soaring divorce rates, etc. He is the first to admit that he is not the kind of computer-wielding high-tech social scientist who can punch out the numbers to support his hypothesis.
Yet he assures us that his conclusions are supported by a wealth of anecdotal data, some of which he can personally vouch for.
Oldenburg recalled that one of his first teaching jobs was in Round Rock, Texas. He had recently taken a bride who resolutely resisted his Third Place theory. Other nations are wiser than the first Mrs. There would be barricades in the streets of Paris at the mere suggestion that the City of Lights be stripped of its beloved bistros in the name of urban renewal. The Viennese think a day is incomplete without a leisurely hour or so of watching the world go by from the vantage point of a favorite kafe haus.
