Creating Gathering Places: The East Rock Neighborhood, New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, my wife and I have lived in East Rock, a New Haven neighborhood that discovered ways to create the “third places” advocated by Ray Oldenburg in his illuminating book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. Oldenburg, a sociologist at the University of West Florida, had grown dissatisfied with daily life in his Pensacola neighborhood during the 1970s, and that led him to wonder whether people were feeling the same frustrations in other communities across the United States. In the book that resulted, published in 1989, he concluded that “for some time now, the course of urban growth and development in the United States has been hostile to an informal public life; we are failing to provide either suitable or sufficient gathering places necessary for it.”