Photograph by Devyn Glista
Elliott Coffee in Dayton, Kentucky, was a gas station not that long ago. Situated along Sixth Avenue, the off-white building is bedecked with a smiling moon. After ordering coffee or food, customers can choose to sit outside at tables where gas pumps once stood or take a short walk to hang out in a former garage that’s now an inviting space complete with plants and wall art. Honey-hued light pours in from large windows on sunny afternoons, basking the wood tones with warmth.
On this particular day, a group debates which card game to play. Some drink lattes in earth-toned mugs or sip iced drinks. Others twirl yellow daisy poms—the cafe has free-to-take flowers today—between their hands.
A black dog sits politely in one patron’s lap. Chatter rises and falls. A barista floats among tables delivering drinks. A parent holds her baby, who is gently cooing. Some people simply sit and read, flipping pages in silence.
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Opened in summer 2024 by Elijah Knapp, his wife Isabelle, and his brother Asa, Elliott was launched with the concept of third places in mind. “We started with the essential idea of how a space affects people more than just the product,” Knapp says. “In a sense, I think the reason cafés thrive is that people are looking for spaces to call home away from home.”
One attribute of third places is how they can foster connection. Especially after the pandemic’s onset, talk of isolation in an increasingly digitized world has been prevalent. In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic. According to a poll published by the American Psychiatric Association in early 2024, 30 percent of adults say they’ve experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week over the past year. Ten percent said they felt lonely every day, and those aged 18–34 were most likely to claim such feelings.
In the same poll, respondents were most likely to feel a sense of community and belonging among their family (65 percent) and friends (53 percent) and in their neighborhoods (20 percent).
Vikas Mehta, a professor of urbanism at the University of Cincinnati, says that third places have a real role when considering loneliness in the public health realm. “Whether they become a part of a routine, your rhythm of life, to see others or meet somebody regularly in your neighborhood, they’re quite critical to fighting that sort of loneliness,” he says. “There isn’t a lot of research on that yet, but there’s a direct link to it in terms of health.”
Speaking on public libraries as a third space, Mehta says they’re a “real social, psychological support for people who are have-nots, people in between, and haves because you may not be homeless, but you might be elderly and lonely and your library is the place to go and chitchat and borrow a book.” Of course, third places can be a host of locations beyond libraries: bookstores, cafés, barber shops, bars, taverns, or essentially any place one might connect with others.
Mehta recently wrote an encyclopedia entry defining third places, which he differentiates from public spaces. “A third place is a place other than the home or workplace,” he writes, “where people can regularly visit and commune with friends, neighbors, and strangers.”
Unlike public spaces, third places can be private even while providing a sense of belonging and social capital—all of which helps build the foundation of a civil society, civic engagement, and democracy.
Photograph by Devyn Glista
The term “third place” was first coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, where he lays out the importance of having so-called third places where people can connect outside of the home (first place) or work (second place). Whether dwindling or rising in number, “third place” has certainly become a buzzword in post-pandemic years. The New York Times published an article in February asking “Where Have All the ‘Third Places’ Gone?” Similarly, Vox ran a story in May 2024 titled “If you want to belong, find a third place.”
Starbucks evoked Oldenburg in the company’s “bold vision” of reclaiming third places in late 2024. Last summer, Columbia University Business School published a study about the “power of third places” that examined how the presence of Starbucks cafés could increase the number of startups launched in neighborhoods. The school posited that introducing a Starbucks could boost entrepreneurship between 2.3 and 11.8 percent in any given neighborhood lacking such places to network.
Mehta says the popularity of the term “third place” has gained legs in contemporary times. His purpose in writing the encyclopedia entry was not just to define the term’s origins but to explain where the concept was situated in the present. “I would say, 15 or so years ago, Starbucks started to use the term ‘third places,’ ” he says. “There’s been a very quick sort of corporatization of the idea because it’s nice and warm terminology. Your third place is convivial. You can connect with people. It’s a sense of community.”
In Mehta’s entry, he writes that there was a general concern in the 1970s and ’80s of urban social life eroding due to the post-World War II emphasis on a culture of privacy and individual comforts. That’s what Oldenburg reacted to with his argument in favor of third places.
Mehta says Oldenburg introduced the term as a way to say that American society was now largely working on a two-legged stool of work and home. In the ’90s, American cities saw a return to urban life as they regenerated their centers; at the same time, coffee culture was taking hold in American cities. Then corporations started using the term.
Yet Mehta points out that just because a business sells coffee or slings beers doesn’t necessarily mean it functions as a third place. “Oldenburg had actually found that these places were where people interacted with others, somewhat familiar and sometimes not even familiar,” he says. “It’s somebody in your neighborhood who you’ve seen but now you’re sitting around in the same place so you can chitchat or find a common interest. That’s what he figured out actually built a lot of social capital.”
Mehta describes third places as “homely, unpretentious, and easygoing with a low profile,” which provide an air of openness and accessibility. “But perhaps the two most important characteristics of a third place are that it is a neutral ground where people have no obligations and are free to come and go, and that it acts as a leveler, where one’s socioeconomic status does not affect participation.”
Knapp says one of his goals with Elliott Coffee is to create human-centered experiences. “We need fewer things that feel like they’re driven by money or growth or volume and more things that are driven by depth of actual human connection,” he says.
If he were to list the most important aspects of his lifestyle, Knapp—who lives four blocks from Elliott Coffee with his wife and young son—says he’d want a cozy home, friends, and a handful of places where he could be a regular that are within walking distance of his house.
Joe Nickol of Yard & Co., the Over-the- Rhine-based urban design/build studio, says that when he thinks of third places, Elliott Coffee floats to the top of his list. That nod comes with a bit of a bias: Yard & Co. owns the old gas station building housing Elliott.
Nickol says every member of the shop’s workplace embodies the idea that the café is a place to stop and slow down. “The need for third places is so great and our collective ability to deliver them at scale is so challenged that, just out of pure demand, we’re seeing rapid innovation in terms of gathering in places where traditionally gathering wasn’t formalized,” he says, using Yard & Co.’s office on Pleasant Street as an example. He describes that street as a tight area where people from all walks of life live.
“Any time the weather outside is even close to being nice, they’re taking over the street after the sun goes down and treating Pleasant Street as a between-work-and-home place,” he says. “Our work at Yard & Co. tries to tap into that innate human desire to be social and do it in terms that you don’t have to think about what you’re wearing or what you’re going to say or who might even be there that you want to avoid or seek out. You can just be yourself, more vernacular or casual, and just show up as you are.”
Another local example Nickol notes is Walnut Hills’s Five Points Alley, which is billed as a community courtyard. While no longer actively involved in Five Points, Yard & Co. cofounder Kevin Wright had a central role in bringing it to life. Nickol points to two ways it functions as a third place: It serves as a place to have hard face-to-face conversations in a changing neighborhood, and it’s an economic generator that’s helped bring new life to surrounding buildings.
“In that case, it became a third place, just not in the way we traditionally think about it,” says Nickol. “But it was a third place in that it was shared between many different users who directly access the space.”
Photograph by Catherine Viox
Nickol’s background is in architecture, but he originally wanted to design large-scale spaces like stadiums and airports. The closest thing he had to a third place growing up was his dad’s barber shop. When he was a junior in college, he studied in Rome and, for the first time, enjoyed a walkable city.
“Within a very short amount of time, even though Italian wasn’t my native tongue, I became a part of that community because of what third places allow, the sense of welcoming and belonging,” he recalls, adding that the experience led to his career path of designing neighborhoods and downtown areas.
After living in Pittsburgh for a decade, Nickol got married in 2010 and settled in Cincinnati six years later. The same year, he and Wright wrote The Neighborhood Playbook through People’s Liberty, the nonprofit entrepreneurship program that invested in civic-minded creative projects. When thinking of third places, Nickol says we have to start viewing them as part of public infrastructure.
“As a collective mindset, we have to start valuing these shared experiences and these shared places as just as important or even more important than historically because of the virtualization of the world,” he says. “And we’re starting to see this in the market. It’s just as important as access to good schools, jobs, public spaces, and natural areas. Third places are starting to be the reason people buy a house in a certain place.”
Cincinnati has seen a boom in institutions renovating their spaces with gathering in mind. The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library has been unveiling renovations across its 41 branches as part of a Facility Master Plan; notably, the Main Library downtown reopened last summer with redesigned meeting rooms, interactive areas for kids and teens, and a new outdoor plaza where the public can relax, gather, and connect.
The Mercantile Library reopened its doors in November after a year of renovations. Along with being able to add up to 20,000 more books, the member-based library now has new spaces for meeting, studying, and working. The crown jewel might just be the cozy club room, complete with a fireplace, lush green velvet seating, and city views.
Amy Hunter, director of community and experience, says creating more space for people to connect was one of the goals of the Mercantile’s $5.3 million renovation project. “When we were founded in 1835, connecting and networking was basically one of the things we were chartered for,” she says, adding that the founders knew intellectually and culturally the goal could better be reached together.
“We want people to find their people here, and it happens a lot,” says Hunter. “We’ve got something for everybody, from the ridiculous to the sublime to the esoteric and the eccentric, and everything in between.”
Hunter has worked at the Mercantile for nine years. In that time, she’s seen members grow from simply joining to serving on the board of trustees or leading a book club. And the small staff of eight is linked by a common interest: They love books.
“We’re here for our members,” says Hunter. “It’s funny because we’ll have members come in and say, Oh, I don’t want to bother you while you’re working, but no, we’re here for you. It’s been really rewarding, especially after having been closed, to see so many friends again.”
Like Nickol, Hunter grew up in an area lacking access to third places. During childhood in a small farm town, her favorite place to be was (and still is) in a book. The Mercantile hosts multiple book clubs as well as other programming like yoga and writing workshops. “Talking about books with other people and coming across a book that I or members wouldn’t have sought out builds community,” Hunter says. “Whether people like the same things I read or hate it, it’s still a really valuable conversation that happens in person.”
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum
The Cincinnati Art Museum also unveiled a renovated ground level in December, with new rooms, resources, and amenities like a common area for schools, classrooms, study rooms, and other updates. Emily Agricola Holtrop, the museum’s director of learning and interpretation, says the renovations allow school groups to have lunch at the museum, more art-making programs for all ages, and additional ticketed programs. When not being used by schools during field trips, the classrooms and common areas can be the perfect place for families to chill, groups to eat, or people to read and study.
Holtrop says the museum’s free admission also helps break down perceived barriers for anyone who might feel like it isn’t for them. She says any time she can be in the gallery with visitors is a great day of work, seeing people make connections with art, staff, and each other as they go through CAM’s collection. “Allowing people just to connect and get out of the way of that connection, I think, is one of the most important things we do,” she says.
The museum’s post-pandemic programs have been popular, says Holtrop, attracting everyone from empty-nesters wanting to meet others with similar interests to friend groups to anyone looking to make a connection. “We have people who tell us that the museum is their church, that they find a lot of solace and spiritual connection here,” she says. “It’s a place to be calm and content and put the world away, an escape very similar to what people experience at church, but then we also have families coming who just want to teach their kids about history and culture.”
Knapp says people need places like Elliott Coffee where you can randomly connect with others; he met his wife when he took her order at a coffee shop. That kind of connection probably wouldn’t happen at, say, a Buffalo Wild Wings, Knapp suggests.
“That’s not the priority of those restaurant spaces,” Knapp says. “The space has to be designed to be interactive so that people have a chance to know someone’s name, know a little more about them, and connect them with other people. I think if we’re just experiencing efficient places, then we really are more isolated.”
In the time Elliott Coffee has been open, Knapp has regularly observed these could-be transient connections, like strangers meeting in line and returning another day as friends or neighbors exclaiming, Oh, you live over there? While opening a café is not the most revenue-centric decision, Knapp says he and his business partners measure success by their people-building connections and friendships.
“We want something that we want to see in a neighborhood,” Knapp says of Elliott Coffee. “It’s the concept of the old tavern or the general store. You know, it’s You live right there and run the store downstairs. Obviously, we’re in a different era of human existence, but I think there’s a really important renaissance happening.”
On a walk through Dayton, Knapp says he’s likely to see someone he knows; the majority of small businesses in the area are run by people who live nearby. In the internet age, the power of even a short interaction—like someone taking your coffee order or running into an acquaintance— shouldn’t be underestimated.
It’s a sentiment Knapp understands well. If people feel lonely and cynical, he says, their social media feeds will reflect that attitude. And most passing interactions might feel like you’re inconveniencing the other person. “But here at Elliott, we really draw out the ordering experience,” he says. “To me, you’re not just coming to get a coffee. There’s some power in knowing that someone is looking you in the eyes, seeing you as a human being, and knowing you have something to offer just by being in the same space.”
Mehta’s encyclopedia entry notes that virtual third spaces like chat rooms and group texts can offer connection or a sense of safety among people with shared interests. He also says the divide between home and work has grown even fuzzier post-COVID.
“If you’re able to find an amenity within walking distance in your neighborhood, that’s very useful from an equity perspective and from a health perspective,” he says. “But if that place can also be a third place, that’s an added advantage for sense of community, social cohesion, and so on and so forth.”
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