The Great Good Place Concepts

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities

by Ray Oldenburg · 30 Nov 2001 · 215pp · 71,155 words

PRAISE FOR The Great Good Place “The great value of this book is that Mr. Oldenburg has given us an insightful and extremely useful new lens through which to look at

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’ll drink to that.” —Booklist “A book that should be read by everyone in North America over the age of 16.” —The World of Beer “ ‘The Great Good Place’ by Ray Oldenburg is a treatise on the ‘third places’ in our lives . . . he makes so much sense. He describes ways to gather back our

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West Florida, coined the term “third place” and is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading advocates for great good places. His book, The Great Good Place, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice for 1989, was reissued in 1999. He is frequently sought after as a media commentator and

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Pensacola, Florida. EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RAY OLDENBURG Celebrating the Third Place Inspiring Stories About the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities MARLOWE & COMPANY NEW YORK CELEBRATING THE THIRD PLACE: Inspiring Stories About the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities Copyright © 2001 by Ray Oldenburg Published by Marlowe & Company An

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public transportation. Awareness of these trends and of the sharp decline in the number of third places in the United States prompted me to write The Great Good Place a decade ago. That volume details, illustrates, and analyzes informal public gathering places both here and abroad. It identifies their many social functions and their

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unique importance as focal points of community life. Now in its third edition, The Great Good Place has become basic reading among a growing number of groups encouraging revitalization of our urban areas and of public life. That book and the publicity

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ask, What’s special about a Fred’s hot dog, you might also ask, What’s special about Annie’s? Ray Oldenburg, in his book The Great Good Place, describes characteristics of places like Fred’s and Annie’s. They are on neutral ground, welcome all people, are accessible, modest, and playful. Customers develop

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and there, but to the betterment of the human community. He realized it wouldn’t be easy but worthwhile endeavors rarely are. My introduction to The Great Good Place occurred in the early 1990s as I scoured the labyrinthine stacks of the Chicago library I was a young man in search of answers. Standing

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weeks later, I think I am still pretty thankful to Ray for the inspiration and direction offered in his epic tome of revolutionary social theory, The Great Good Place. The truth is I was very lonely at the time myself and, as a student of social theory and frequenter of the myriad coffeehouses in

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Chicago, The Great Good Place simply struck a chord in my bored Gen-X heart. It spoke to me. I was inspired. So I took to the road with an

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eyes ablaze with passionate zeal, we had not only a plan, but a philosophy! Ray’s name was always on our lips, a copy of The Great Good Place close at hand, and a stack of photocopied essays I wrote, entitled “What Is a Third Place?,” ready to stuff into the hands or pastry

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, tax planning, insurance, management, and old junky pickup trucks. It was trial by fire but we kept showing up, guided more by the principles of The Great Good Place than by sound business practice. We could have thrown in the towel on many occasions, but we really had no idea, so we just kept

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be confused with a contact or therapy group, since people are not required to be social, only invited to be so. As Ray states in The Great Good Place, the nature of a third place is one in which the presence of a “regular” is always welcome, although never required. Membership is a simple

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Public Market, one guiding principle I have used is Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the third place, which I discovered in 1993 in his book The Great Good Place. After reading his book, I realized that we had been trying to create a third place all along, even though we had never even heard

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my schedule did not permit it. How I have regretted missing that treat! Joyce (she chides me for calling her Ms. Goldstein) knew me through The Great Good Place, which she had purchased for all her staff, and which inspired her to pen “The Third Place” for the San Francisco Focus. The book also

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magazine, Gourmet, and Food & Wine, and when the critic for California magazine visited for his review, he came back the next day for lunch. Though The Great Good Place made Joyce more mindful of the social experience at Square One and of the relationships between staff, customers, and herself, it is clear that she

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running in our operation. In a talk about coffeehouse theory one day, Pat suggested that we needed to get our hands on a book called The Great Good Place. He pointed around his own coffeehouse, where we were meeting, to two New Orleans policemen taking a break at one table, a student doing homework

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we observed pumping out coffee to go, we had not, on the other hand, considered the establishment to be a third place as defined in The Great Good Place. Another concept we had not really thought about was the relatively common practice in years past of shopkeepers living on the premises of their business

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a minister and the other is a psychological therapist. One of the best surprises we had was to discover that the author of the book The Great Good Place, Dr. Ray Oldenburg, lived and taught in the town we had settled in. One of our customers was his student at the University of West

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important element in the revi-talization of the neighborhood. We just didn’t know what it was called. As luck would have it, I discovered The Great Good Place, ironically misfiled in the cooking and food section of the bookshop I was browsing. After quickly reading the book, I realized there was a name

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to be in prison, but you can sure “chill the fuck out while you there.” At the time I hadn’t read Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place, but as a professor on a landscape architecture faculty, as an environmental psychologist, as a lover of cities, I’d toyed with not dissimilar ideas

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. Certainly I’d read reviews of The Great Good Place, and long pieces about it in magazines. I knew the term—third place—and that morning, listening to Chicago, the term came to mind. Prison

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especially indebted to Matthew Lore, who took charge of the first book after Marlowe acquired it and who crafted the second and third editions, giving The Great Good Place new life. Matthew encouraged this companion volume and I have greatly enjoyed working with him. One could not ask for a more polite and considerate

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

by Ray Oldenburg · 17 Aug 1999

Acclaim for Ray Oldenburg and The Great Good Place “Ray Oldenburg is inspirational. He is the first to recognize and articulate the importance of the greeting place (third place) for the well-being of

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, President, Terranomics Development and founder, Third Place Books, Seattle, Washington “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t refer to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place. At a time when all great, good independent bookstores everywhere are under siege, we’re fortunate that Mr. Oldenburg has articulated our message so clearly

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.” —Mitchell Kaplan, owner, Books & Books, Miami, Florida “The Great Good Place has put into words and focus what I’ve been doing all my life, from the barbershop I remember as a child to the bookstore

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provide that third place in which people can “hang out.” Ray Oldenburg has defined those good places while still recognizing the magical chemistry they require. The Great Good Place is a book to read, to recommend, and to quote.” —Victor W. Herman, owner, Horizon Books, with locations in Traverse City, Petoskey, and Cadillac, Michigan

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essential to the vitality of a city and its people and it also includes a social history of informal life throughout the world.” —Florida Architect “The Great Good Place is a great good book. As a fellow defender of neighborhoods and all they stand for, I salute you on it. —Andrew M. Greeley Copyright

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the subject of our art and our literature? HENRY FAIRLEE But aside from friends, there must also be a Place. I suppose that this is the Great Good Place that every man carries in his heart. . . . PETE HAMILL A community life exists when one can go daily to a given location at a given

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time and see many of the people one knows. PHILIP SLATER George Dane: I know what I call it . . . “The Great Good Place.” The Brother: I’ve put it myself a little differently . . . “The Great Want Met.” George Dane: Ah, yes—that’s it! from

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“The Great Good Place” by HENRY JAMES Contents PREFACE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION INTRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PART I 1. THE PROBLEM OF PLACE IN AMERICA 2. THE CHARACTER OF

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would I wish to offer solely a description, which good sociology often is. I wanted to make the case for the informal public life and the Great Good Places essential to it. There is an urgency implicit in the broad-scale destruction of these kinds of places in the United States; we are inadequately

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popular understanding of the necessity of a vital informal public life. I have declined the pose and language of scientific reporting and mean to promote the Great Good Places of society as much as analyze them. Like an attorney-at-law, I am defending a most worthy client who may be facing oblivion and

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tempting to recount the many and varied experiences, the rich flow of correspondence, and the kindred spirits met as a result of the publication of The Great Good Place six years ago, the space allotted here may be more usefully employed. This second preface is devoted to those readers who have more than a

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. Some of these are developed at greater length in the text proper; some are introduced here for the first time. In the brief period since The Great Good Place was published, many books have appeared with similar themes. America seems to be undergoing a massive reassessment. In the simplest terms, we got where we

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of the third place with those in charge of the workplace, but the differences are no doubt felt and contribute to the mystical lure of the Great Good Place. In the third place, right prevails and whatever hint of a hierarchy exists is predicated upon human decency. As a black graduate student attending the

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neighborhoods of the have-nots of society and can only imagine that they have done the people a favor. In that society apart afforded by the Great Good Place there exists a link between virtue reflected and deference paid not found in the external world. As a friend of mine once put it: “Each

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one of the Kyklades Islands demonstrating that a third place is better than an old folks home. Entrepreneurs around the country are being inspired by The Great Good Place to revive existing and to open new “third place” enterprises and businesses. On the pages following are just a few examples of how they’re

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Library. Annie Cheatham has spent a lifetime founding great good places. Her most recent venture, which she founded at about the same time she read The Great Good Place, is Annie’s Garden Store and Gift Shop in Amherst, Massachusetts. Photo of Annie’s Garden Center © Annie Cheatham Elders offer much-needed help at

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local great good place. In 1996, Tracy and Steve Spracklen opened their Good Neighbor Coffee Shop in Pensacola, Florida, not knowing that the author of The Great Good Place, a book that had inspired them, lived in town. Here is the author at the Good Neighbor Coffee Shop having his weekly “Coffee with the

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this discussion: third places serve to separate the sexes, not to absorb them into equal and undifferentiated participation. Upon further examination of this characteristic of the Great Good Place, one can appreciate that it could hardly be otherwise. Sex identities are never forgotten and either same-sex association or mixed association will dominate any

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

by Karen Cheung · 15 Feb 2022 · 297pp · 96,945 words

culture”: Lung Ying-tai and Andreas Walther, Dear Andreas (Taiwan: 天下雜誌, 2007). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the concept of the third place: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1999). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it

by Dom Nozzi · 15 Dec 2003 · 282pp · 69,481 words

. —Jim Kunstler The most important task of the urbanist is controlling size. —David Mohney As sociology professor and planning consultant Ray Oldenburg points out in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, segregation, isolation, compartmentalization, and sterilization seem

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Commission, 1995. Nozzi, D. “West Palm Beach FL: Back From the Brink.” http://user.gru. net/domz/palm.htm. Accessed 28 March 2002. Oldenburg, R. The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe, 1989. “Passes Help People Hop onto the Bus.” Transportation Exchange Update, April 1994. Pederson, E. O. Transportation in Cities. New York: Pergamon

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words

Trades Department, March 11, 2019, https://ttd.org/policy/principles-for-the-transit-workforce-in-automated-vehicle-legislation-and-regulations/. 217“third space”: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 20. 217“a half

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future

by Noreena Hertz · 13 May 2020 · 506pp · 133,134 words

chess and dominoes, whilst also discussing politics and local affairs.24 Some local businesses even become what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, ‘third places’: neither home, nor work, but rather gathering spaces abuzz with conversation where regulars meet up and people of different social and economic backgrounds

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A., and Roger Highfield. SuperCooperators: Beyond the Survival of the Fittest: Why Cooperation, Not Competition, is the Key of Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 1999). Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014). Putnam, Robert. Bowling

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Community Roles of the Barber Shop and Beauty Salon,’ 2019, https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/community-roles-barber-shop-and-beauty-salon. 25 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Da Capo Press, 1999), p.22. Note that the ‘universal’ accessibility of such ‘third places’ is itself an idealistic assumption that does not necessarily take

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words

reader and thinker, was concerned with what’s called the Third Place, which Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist, so succinctly espoused in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. Kapulka thought, “You’ve got the home, work, and this public area where you socialize, a pub, a restaurant, a bingo hall. There’s a

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop

by Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger · 1 Jan 1999 · 230pp · 62,294 words

Yang, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 120–21. 5 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 296. 6 Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report (New York: HarperBusiness, 1992), 39–40. 7 Unscrupulous blending has also had a

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. McKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. National Coffee Association. Winter Drinking Survey. New York: National Coffee Association, 2005. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Peel, Carl. “Los Angeles, a Microcosm of the Country.” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal 169, no. 4 (April 1997): 16

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

by Susan Pinker · 30 Sep 2013 · 404pp · 124,705 words

Relationships and Quality of Life,” in Well-being, ed. Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz. 8. For more about the characteristics of “third places,” see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon, 1989); Ray Oldenburg

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, Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities (New York: Marlowe, 2000). Thanks are due to my brother Steve for introducing me to the term meatspace. 9

Howard Rheingold

by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993) · 26 Apr 2012

lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the sense of place is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg proposed in The Great Good Place, there are three essential places in people's lives : the place we live, the place we work, and the place we gather for conviviality. Although

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environment with a synchronous chat system. IRC is Internet's pioneering multi-user chat system. IRC is the corner pub, the caf‚, the common room--the "great good place" of the Net. Most computers connected to Internet run a program called "talk" that enables people on different host computers to communicate screen-to-screen

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old neighborhoods with modern malls, and caf‚s with fast-food franchises, was part of this "society of the spectacle," precisely because they help destroy the "great good places" where the public sphere lives. More than twenty years later, Debord looked back and emphasized this aspect of his earlier forecasts: For the agora, the

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, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Odzer, Cleo. Virtual Spaces: Sex and the Cyber Citizen. New York: Berkley Books, 1997. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of the Community, 3rd ed. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999. Ong, Walter