Where are our Third Places?

Much of the ABCD work we have been doing looks at the places and spaces that we use in our daily life. How do we use our parks? Where can we walk from point A to point B? How do the businesses in our neighborhood affect our routines? We all spend a considerable amount of time at work and at home, but where is that other space we go to meet friends, our significant other, or family that is comfortable and familiar? Ray Oldenburg, a professor at the University of West Florida calls this extra place beyond home and work the “third place.”

We have watched our favorite characters on weekly sitcoms go to their third place. On the show “Cheers”, it’s the bar. In “Friends”, it’s Central Perk. And on “How I Met Your Mother” it’s MacClaren’s Pub. One of the goals as we learn about and spend time in our North Denver community is to find the third place that we have here and what third places mean to community life.

We tried our local coffee shops – Laughing Latte, Black Eye Coffee, and Common Grounds. While there are some small groups just talking, mostly these shops are filled with people working on their laptops with headphones in, and only stopping to talk to the barista or ask to plug their computer charger in. In the bars it seems that as the neighborhood is branded more and more as trendy and “Top of the Town” that people that do not live or work here are coming to see what the cool, new scene is and not make lasting roots.

So what allows these social spaces to hold that welcoming, vibrant status as a third place? Is it one with more couches and less tables for laptops? Is it a smaller bar that not so many people think is trendy? In your lifetime have you known that you have had a third place? Where do you enjoy spending your time with friends and family that is not school or work? Do you have a third place in North Denver? We want to hear about yours!