Where Did Everybody Go? The disappearance of third places in America

plus an orange-ginger olive oil cake from a kitchen in Fes where no one ever rushed

In 1989, the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave us a name for something humans have always known they needed. The third place. Not home, not work, but somewhere else entirely. The café, the pub, the town square, the library, the park bench where strangers become neighbors and neighbors become friends. Oldenburg argued that these spaces were essential to democracy itself, to civic life, to the simple act of being human among other humans. They were critical to fostering a sense of place. A sense of ourselves. He was writing about America. And he was worried.

I’m an American who has spent the past six years living throughout Europe in Ireland, Prague, Normandy, and Portugal. I’ve come to understand what Oldenburg meant, not through sociology, but through the daily rhythm of life in places where third places still thrive. I’ve also come to understand what America has lost when I compare our gathering spaces in the U.S. to those in many parts of Europe.

Europe’s Third Places

In Porto, I’d settle into the ornate Belle Époque surroundings of Café Majestic on Rua de Santa Catarina, a place where intellectuals and artists have gathered since 1921, and watch the afternoon unfold. In Prague’s Vinohrady neighbourhood where I lived, with its Art Nouveau buildings and tree-lined streets, the cafés around náměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad fill everyday with everyone from digital nomads to elderly couples, all sharing the same unhurried air. In San Sebastián, the Plaza de la Constitución, that elegant square with its numbered balconies, once a bullring, now the heart of Basque social life, would hum with the clink of pintxos plates and the murmur of conversation in the golden evening light. In Rouen, I wandered to the Place du Vieux-Marché. It’s an ancient market square shadowed by the weight of history that is still vibrant and alive with the daily ritual of neighbours meeting neighbours.

And in County Clare where I am now, the traditional pubs of Doolin, Limerick, and Lisdoonvarna fill with music and lively conversation. There are always signs outside of them advertising trad music nights, the gathering of traditional Irish musicians who play for hours to the delight of the overflow crowds that gather to cheer them on. These are the kind of establishments where strangers are welcomed into conversation before they’ve finished their first pint.

In all these places, what strikes me isn’t the architecture or the coffee, though both are often excellent, but the quality of time itself. There is no rush. Tables spill out into the community. All demographics gather: grandmothers with grandchildren, teenagers with their friends, the solitary reader, the boisterous group, the visitor from America like me, the suited professional, and the paint-spattered laborer. Social status seems irrelevant. Age seems immaterial. What matters is presence. It’s the willingness to be there, to greet one another, to participate in the low but insistent hum of community life.

Sometimes while walking past a particularly lively terrace or settling into a café for a late-morning coffee, I’ll think something like, there must be a national holiday today. Some sporting event must have just ended. Why else would so many people be sitting here, playing backgammon, drinking espresso while splitting a pastry, enjoying a pint, strolling, greeting one another? And then I remember that this is everyday life. This is Tuesday. Third places don’t exist everywhere in Europe, to be sure, but they are certainly more plentiful than they are in the U.S.

I recently returned to America after five years away. I visited Minneapolis and the Napa Valley. These are places I once called home or places I remembered fondly. I don’t think I would have noticed the absence of third spaces before I left. But now their vacancy was glaring. Where were the gathering places? Where were the strolling people, the tables spilling onto pavements, the unhurried conversations over a second coffee? And then a third? In their absence, I found drive-throughs and parking lots, long drives between suburbs while visiting friends, people clutching paper cups while rushing between obligations, the lonely choreography of errands.

Third Places Haven’t Vanished Entirely From America

At the southwest corner of Washington Square Park in New York where I used to live, I loved walking past the fifteen stone chess tables that form a circle beneath the trees where strangers have gathered for decades, from Bobby Fischer in his youth to the hustlers and regulars who still arrive each morning for blitz games and conversation. In Charleston, South Carolina, the City Market has drawn locals since the 1790s, first to buy meat and produce, now to browse sweetgrass baskets and linger over coffee. It’s a four-block stretch where, as one 19th-century account put it, residents came not just to shop but to drink, play games, and catch up on news. These pockets persist throughout America. They are reminders of what’s possible. And reminders of third places that once existed in America.

But the losses accumulate elsewhere. Across the Midwest, the VFW halls and Elks Lodges where veterans and neighbors once gathered every week are closing at an alarming rate. I remember my grandfather taking me along to his local VFW almost every week when I was growing up. I loved watching his boisterous group of friends while I ate a bowl of soup and a sandwich made by the counter lady who knew everyone’s name. They were all military veterans who would play cards and catch up on news about the country, the town, the family.

In Connecticut alone, thirty VFW posts have shuttered since 2015. The Elks, who once had over two thousand lodges nationwide, are down to fewer than eighteen hundred, their membership halved since 1976. The bowling alleys that Robert Putnam made famous in Bowling Alone have declined even more dramatically. League membership is down 89 percent from its peak, the number of centers fell from twelve thousand in the mid-1960s to under four thousand today. In Marin County, California, the beloved Country Club Bowl, its neon pin visible from the highway for over sixty years, finally closed in 2021. These weren’t just businesses. They were the places where a postal worker might sit next to a lawyer, where a retired teacher might strike up a conversation with a young electrician, where difference dissolved in the shared ritual of a Thursday night league.

A Third Place in Name Only

Of all the third places under threat in the United States, public libraries may be one of the most devastating losses. Unlike a café or bookshop that shutters overnight, the decline of the American library is a slow hollowing out. It’s usually not really a dramatic closure but a gradual retreat. According to data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, physical visits to U.S. public libraries dropped from roughly 1.25 billion in 2019 to about 671 million in 2022. Over the past decade, the average number of visits per user has fallen by nearly half.

Collections have shrunk too. There are 162 million fewer print books on library shelves in 2022 than in 2010. Hours have been cut, branches consolidated, and in 2025, federal funding itself came under direct attack when the Department of Government Efficiency began slashing IMLS grants to states. The buildings are still standing, (mostly), but the institution inside them is thinning.

This matters because libraries are one of the last truly free third places in the U.S. They are one of the only public gathering spaces in many communities where no purchase is required. No membership demanded and there’s no algorithm deciding who belongs.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg has called libraries essential social infrastructure. They are places that facilitate the kind of casual, unscripted human connection that coffee shops and co-working spaces only offer to those who can pay. When a library reduces its hours to three days a week, or loses the staff who knew every regular by name, or pulls thousands of books from its shelves, it doesn’t make headlines the way a closure would. But the third place has already disappeared. It just hasn’t been announced yet because there is still a bit of movement inside the building.

The Third Place Connection to Loneliness

The data backs up what I experienced on my recent trip to America. In 2023, the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness a public health epidemic. He noted that half of American adults had already reported experiencing loneliness even before the pandemic. In a 2025 study from the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, nearly 40% of US adults now report moderate to severe loneliness. The health effects are stark. Social isolation carries risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It can increase premature mortality by up to 50%. One in five Americans says they have nobody to talk to about important matters.

The Culprits of Third Place Demise

Everyone is trying to work out what is happening to America right now. Why it seems to be unravelling. Why there’s so much rage and disconnect. Why there’s so much sorrow. The explanations are endless. There’s political polarization, social media, the pandemic, economic anxiety, and the fraying of institutions. All of these matter. But I wonder if we’re overlooking something more fundamental: We have nowhere left to be together.

Oldenburg identified the culprits decades ago. Post-war suburbanization scattered communities across car-dependent landscapes. Rigid zoning laws separated homes from shops, neighbors from neighbors. The corner café and the local pub became impossible in places designed around the car and the garage door.

What Oldenburg called the “home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle” became the American way of life. Urban renewal projects demolished markets and squares to build highways. The few gathering places that remained were swallowed by chain restaurants optimised for turnover, not lingering and greeting neighbors.

A 2024 survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that more than one in five Americans live in communities with no access to public or commercial spaces where they could gather with neighbors. In the absence of physical spaces we retreated to digital ones. But as research increasingly shows, social media is a poor substitute. It connects us by ideology rather than geography, feeds us content we already agree with, and replaces the randomness of real encounters with the curation of the algorithm.

The Neutral Ground That Digital Spaces Can’t Provide

The third place offers something different. Oldenburg described it as neutral ground. It’s a leveler where social status fades and conversation becomes the main activity. It’s where, he wrote, “there must be places in which people can find and sort one another out across the barriers of social difference.”

In the ancient Greek agora, in the English coffeehouse, in the Irish pub, in the Spanish plaza, humans have always created these spaces. They are, as Oldenburg’s co-author Karen Christensen argues, the answer to loneliness, polarization, and the unravelling of civic life.

What these spaces offered was not just togetherness. They provided a particular kind of friction…the productive and (usually) the benevolent kind. In a pub or a plaza, you can disagree with someone and still share a table with them. You can argue about politics and then ask how their kids are doing. The physical presence of the other person, the fact that you will see them again next week and the week after that, imposes a discipline that the internet never could. You can’t become the worst version of yourself because you aren’t anonymous. You are a neighbor, a regular, someone with a reputation to maintain and a community to return to. The algorithm rewards outrage. The corner booth or table with a view of the plaza or the library reading rooms reward decency.

Essential Infrastructure

What I’ve witnessed in Europe isn’t nostalgia or Old World charm. It’s something more practical: a society that has decided through urban design and cultural habits that people need places to be together. The cafés of Prague, the plazas of Spain, the pubs of Ireland. These aren’t luxuries. They are infrastructure as essential as roads, schools, or grocery stores. They are where the small transactions of community life take place: the catching up on news, the debate about football, the solace offered after a loss, the welcome extended to a stranger. A place to read. To gather. To mourn. To celebrate.

I think of the Europeans and others who ask me lately with genuine bewilderment, what is happening in America? They see the political turmoil, the anger, the isolation. I used to struggle to explain it. Now I wonder if part of the answer is simpler than we think: we stopped making places where people could sit together, where strangers could become neighbors, where the daily work of democracy, the negotiation of difference, the practice of empathy, the habit of public life could actually happen.

A common sign in Ireland, inviting people to gather in the pub for traditional Irish music and a celebration of community.

Making Space for Third Places

The good news is that third places aren’t magic. They can be rebuilt. Cities can change zoning laws to allow mixed-use development to bring the corner café back to the residential street. We can invest in parks and libraries and public spaces designed for lingering rather than passing through. We can choose, as individuals and as communities, to prioritise presence over productivity, to sit down rather than rush past.

I’ve returned to Europe now, to County Clare. I’m writing this from a table in a pub not far from the sea. The fire is lit. A few locals are nursing pints and catching up on the week. Someone has just come in from the rain and is being offered a seat near the warmth. Someone’s scruffy yellow lab is sitting at the feet of its owner who is chatting with the bartender. They are clearly old friends. Or perhaps they just met. In Ireland, you never really know because people are so welcoming here. It’s nothing extraordinary. It’s just an ordinary afternoon in a place where people still gather. It feels so cozy and I feel so welcome in this space just as I almost always feel in Ireland.

I think about America often. I think about what we’ve lost and what we might yet rebuild. I hope we can find our way back to something like this: the simple, radical act of gathering together. I hope we can start making genuine time for one another again in real life. I hope we can start remembering that the thread connecting us to our neighbors is spun in places like these. It happens in the unhurried hours at the tables that extend into the street, in the low murmur of voices that tell us: you belong here. We all do.

If the notion of third spaces (and your craving for them) resonated, here are a few recommendations to go a little deeper:

Read: Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christiansen’s The Great Good Place, the book that gave us the language of the third place and coined the term. First published in 1989, it remains startlingly relevant. A new edition co-authored with Karen Christensen will be published sometime in 2026.

Support: EveryLibrary is the only political action committee in the United States dedicated to library funding. They’ve helped secure nearly three billion dollars in library funding through voter and political action. A ten-dollar donation helps secure over sixteen thousand dollars for libraries. If you’d prefer a tax-deductible gift, their research arm, the EveryLibrary Institute, is a 501(c)(3).

Read: The former Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy’s advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, published in 2023. It’s free and it changed the way America talks about connection and the lack of it.

Listen: Here’s a great conversation with Vivek on Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimism podcast.

Watch: Babette’s Feast (1987). A Danish film about a French chef who spends her entire lottery winnings on a single magnificent meal for a small, divided community. It’s the most beautiful argument ever made for what happens when people gather around a table and let food do the quiet work of repair. If the third place is a philosophy, this film is its proof. Another more recent movie I loved about gathering is The Taste of Things starring Juliette Binoche. I consider it perfect.

Practice: Over nearly a decade of researching monasteries across four continents for my books, I've been lucky enough to build real friendships with the monks, nuns, and spiritual practitioners I met along the way. They are people I still turn to when the world feels like too much, which lately has been often. Monasteries are, in many ways, the original third places… communities built entirely around the idea that showing up for one another every day, sharing meals, working side by side, and making space for silence and conversation in equal measure, is the whole point.

I distilled everything they've taught me into The Monastery Method: 30 Days of Ancient Practices for Modern Living, a digital guide organized into four weeks: foundations, nourishment, connection, and integration. Each day includes a story from my travels, the principle behind the practice, concrete steps to try, and reflection questions. It's not religious instruction and it's not wellness fluff. The practices, most of which take about fifteen minutes a day, are grounded in tradition, history, and science. It also includes fourteen recipes from my cookbooks and downloadable worksheets to help you design your own path forward. If this article left you thinking about how to rebuild the kind of gathering and presence we've lost, this is a good place to start.

"A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves."
― Wendell Berry

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Orange-Ginger Olive Oil Cake with Pistachios and Orange Blossom Water

(plus a note on third places, Moroccan pastry culture, and the cakes that bring people together)

Makes 1 large cake (serves 8-10)

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Bake time: 45-50 minutes

In the medina of Fes, I learned that a third place doesn’t need a sign on the door or a menu or a reservation system. It needs a table, a pot of mint tea, and something sweet to share. The woman who taught me this cake, Nabila (she asked me not to use her last name if I ever shared her cake recipe for a personal reason), made it in a kitchen so small we stood shoulder to shoulder while she worked. Yet the generosity of the space felt enormous because of what she put into it and what she expected from it: that people would come, sit, eat, stay.

I’ve been thinking a lot about third places lately, those spaces beyond home and work where community happens almost accidentally. The places where you become a regular. Where someone remembers how you take your coffee or saves you the corner seat. In Morocco, these places are everywhere. The café where men watch football and drink coffee so strong it could wake the dead. The rooftop where women gather after the heat breaks and pass around plates of gazelle horns and chebakia, their fingers dusted with powdered sugar and sesame. The bakery where you bring your own dough and the communal oven does the rest, returning your bread alongside your neighbor’s, the two loaves indistinguishable except for the small mark you pressed into yours before handing it over.

What I loved about Nabila’s kitchen, and about so many kitchens I was invited into across Morocco, is the understanding that a cake is not a dessert. It’s an invitation. It’s the thing you make when you want someone to stay longer, talk more, lean back in their chair and let the afternoon unspool. This cake does that so well. It’s the kind of thing you set on a table and watch disappear in the best possible way, slice by slice, while conversation deepens and no one checks the time.

I’ve modified Nabila’s original recipe over the years. I use whole wheat flour for a nuttier crumb and ground pistachios that give the cake a faintly green-gold interior and a tender, almost marzipan-like richness. Fresh ginger and lemon zest brighten the orange. A little orange blossom water, if you have it, makes the citrus flavor bloom into something more vivid and perfumed. You can omit it and the cake will still be gorgeous, but if you’ve ever walked through the souk in Fes in springtime when the orange trees are flowering and the air smells like the intersection of sweetness and dust and an endless amount of history, you’ll understand why I keep it in.

The olive oil makes the cake exceptionally tender and moist.It transforms it into the kind of cake that improves the day after baking, and then the day after that, too, which makes it ideal for the sort of gathering that forms without a formal plan. Bring it to someone’s kitchen table. Bring it to the park. Bring it to whatever place you’ve been meaning to linger in longer. The pistachios scattered across the top catch the light , a shower of green against that deep, amber-gold surface that is, I think, one of the most beautiful things a cake can be. This is a third place kind of cake.

Ingredients:

• 120g (1 cup) whole wheat flour

• 60g (½ cup) self-rising flour

• 75g (¾ cup) ground pistachios

• ½ tsp fine sea salt

• 1 tsp ground ginger

• 3 large eggs, at room temperature

• 200g (1 cup) granulated sugar

• Zest of 2 medium oranges

• Zest of 1 lemon

• 180ml (¾ cup) extra virgin olive oil

• 120ml (½ cup) freshly squeezed orange juice (about 2 small oranges)

• 1 tbsp (15ml) orange blossom water (optional but highly recommended!)

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 50g (⅓ cup) roughly chopped pistachios, for finishing

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a 23cm (9-inch) round cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.

Sift together both flours, the ground pistachios, salt, and ginger in a medium bowl and set aside. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together with a whisk or hand mixer until the mixture is pale, thick, and falls from the whisk in a slow ribbon, about 3 minutes of vigorous whisking by hand or 2 minutes with a mixer. Add the orange zest and lemon zest and whisk until the oils from the zest perfume the batter and the mixture is fragrant and slightly golden.

Drizzle in the olive oil in a slow, steady stream, whisking continuously, then add the orange juice, the orange blossom water if using, and the vanilla extract, whisking until the batter is smooth and emulsified. It should be glossy at this stage. Add the dry ingredients in two additions, folding gently with a spatula each time until just combined. The batter will be quite liquid and pourable, which is exactly right. Pour it into the prepared pan and give the pan a gentle tap against the counter to release any large air bubbles.

Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until the top is deeply golden and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean or with only a few moist crumbs clinging to it. The cake will dome slightly (it will subside as it cools) and the edges will pull away from the pan.

When the cake comes out of the oven, let it cool in the pan for at least 20 minutes before carefully turning it out onto a serving plate. Scatter the chopped pistachios across the top, pressing them gently so they adhere. Sprinkle with additional orange zest for another pop of color.

This cake keeps well in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 4 days. It is almost better on the second day when the crumb has fully absorbed the olive oil and the citrus has mellowed into something rounder and warmer. It also freezes well, unglazed, for up to a month. Wrap it tightly, then finish with pistachios after thawing.

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