Libraries as Third Places

The public library is the last room in the city where you can exist without buying anything. You can sit there for eight hours and no one will ask you to leave, no one will hover, no one will glance at you with the particular resentment of someone whose rent depends on your consumption. The chair is yours for as long as you need it. The water fountain is free. The bathroom is free. The warmth in winter, the cool in summer, the tables and the light and the electrical outlet for your laptop—all of it is simply there, subsidized by the public and offered without transaction, without barrier, without the small humiliation of buying a coffee you don’t want in order to justify your presence. This is almost impossible to find anymore. I didn’t fully understand why until I spent eleven years working the other side of a counter.

Ray Oldenburg wrote about third places in 1989, the year I turned eight and, as it happens, the year the used bookstore on Wickenden Street opened. His argument was straightforward: humans need three spaces. The first is home. The second is work. The third is the informal public gathering space—the café, the barbershop, the pub, the bookstore—where citizens encounter one another outside the structures of family and employment, where you can sit and think and belong without the performance either space demands. He was describing the social infrastructure that holds a city together, the room where democracy rehearses itself over a cup of coffee and a newspaper. I didn’t know I was working in a third place when I was there, but I was. We all were. We just didn’t know we were in the last gasp of something.

The third places are closing, and the ones that remain have changed. You can still find a café in Providence—several, actually, and they’re lovely—but you can’t sit in one without money. The coffee costs five dollars, the pastry costs seven. If you stay for three hours, you’ve spent fifteen. A barber’s chair still exists on Washington Street, on Smith Street, but you pay forty dollars for the cut now, and the social function has narrowed to the transaction. The pubs that survive are not the old neighborhood joints where the fisherman and the accountant and the philosophy professor might find themselves in conversation; they’re restaurants, and the real estate has tripled, and the person at the next table is someone you’ll never see again. The toll gate is everywhere. Even the bookstore—and I say this with the particular sadness of someone who loved a bookstore—even the bookstore was a third place that required you to buy something to stay. I did so happily, for eleven years. It was a small price, and it supported a thing I believed in. But it was still a price. It was still a till.

I remember a Tuesday afternoon in autumn, maybe 2019, when a man came in and asked if he could use the bathroom. He hadn’t bought anything. I showed him where it was without asking. He was there for forty minutes, and when he came out, he stood in the biography section and read for another hour. He didn’t speak to anyone. He didn’t buy anything. He just stood there, in the warmth and the light, among other people who were also just standing there, and then he left. I wondered afterward where he went when he left us. Where does a person go when they need a room to exist in for a while? Now I know: the library. The answer is always the library.

I walk into the Rochambeau Branch on a Wednesday morning in March, and I see the answer more clearly than I ever have. A woman in her sixties is at a desktop computer, and her daughter—I assume—is beside her, pointing at the screen. They’re looking at job listings. The woman has taken notes on a pad in careful handwriting. An elderly man in a cardigan sits by the window with a stack of four books beside him; he’s wearing a pocket watch chain but no watch, and he’s asleep with his head back and his mouth slightly open. Three kids, maybe eight and nine and ten, are at a table in the back with a stack of graphic novels. One of them is eating a lunch he brought from home. No one has asked him where he bought it. Three teenagers are in the study area with laptops; from the intensity of their focus, I’d guess they don’t have quiet rooms at home. A man who smells of cold and old clothes is asleep in a corner chair, his jacket pulled tight. No one is bothering him. Next to him, a woman in a business suit is reading Architectural Digest, and it’s hard to know if she’s on a lunch break or if she just needed to be near other people in a place where she didn’t have to account for herself.

This is what I’ve come to understand: the library hasn’t just survived the collapse of third places. It has absorbed their functions. It has become the job training center, the asylum, the community room, the study hall, the reading room, the shelter, the place where solitude and company exist at the same table. It is doing the work that used to be distributed across a whole ecosystem of informal spaces. The civic institutions that used to catch people—the mental health services, the community centers, the cheap hotels with desk clerks who knew everyone—they’ve been systematically reduced or priced out of existence. The third places that offered both sanctuary and society have been rationalized into commercial zones. So the library has expanded. It has had to. It is the only room left that asks nothing of you but that you be there.

This is not an argument about books, though I love books, and I loved the bookstore. This is not nostalgia, which is a way of asking for things to be restored to a state that serves the person feeling nostalgic and no one else. This is an argument about the architecture of a humane city. It’s about the fact that a human being needs to exist somewhere without transaction, without judgment, without the requirement to be productive or to consume. The public library is not charming. It’s not quaint. It’s not a fetish object for people who think bookstores are romantic. It’s a basic requirement. And it’s fragile. Every year, somewhere, a library closes. They close because funding dries up, because the property is valuable, because a council decides libraries are less important than something else. The people who lose them are the people who needed them most: not the people with the quiet rooms at home, but the woman studying for her job certification, the man who needed to exist somewhere warm, the kid with the graphic novel.

I think of that man who used the bathroom and read in the biography section. I think of where he goes now. I think of the woman and her daughter at the Rochambeau computer, facing the logistics of her economic survival in a place where no one asked her to prove her worthiness. I think of the sleeping man in the corner, and how he is left unmolested in a public room. I think of all of us, in our various states of need and solitude and quiet seeking, and I think of the miracle that there is still one room in the city where we can all be, together and apart, without paying for it. The library doesn’t feel like much until you understand what it’s replacing. Once you do, you see it for what it is: the last commons, the last third place, the last free air. It deserves to be fought for. Not as a relic, but as a foundation.