Posts Tagged ‘social capita.’

Post offices as third places

January 16th, 2009

Rural post offices are special places.  That’s the message Katie at South Dakota Magazine presented yesterday. 

While telling a story about how the postmaster in one small town successfully delivered a letter addressed only with “Under the Water Tower in St. Lawrence”, Katie identifies one of the special qualities of rural communities: people (including post masters) know each other and try to help each other out – even when we forget things like addresses.  

Ray Oldenburg (who I wrote about yesterday) believes rural post offices are special for another reason:  they are informal gather places where community is built.  In his words, they are “third places.” 

I’ve never felt that post offices meet the criteria for being “third places.”  That said, I think older people probably look at post offices differently.

Since reading Oldenburg’s ­The Great Good Place, I’ve tried to watch our local post office from my office, just across the street.  I’ve noticed that older residents do tend to stop for short conversations — meeting the main criteria for a third place.  Post offices are also easily accessible and people from all walks of life meet there. So, we can check a few more criteria off the list that create third places.  But to me, post offices just doesn’t have the feel that I want a third place to have. 

Most likely, post offices once served as more effective third places than they do today, hence we see older generations still using them as places for conversation. 

But I think it also points to another of Oldenburg’s key arguments:  we’ve lost many of our third places; and with them we’ve lost much of our sense of community. I hope that we haven’t lost so many of them, however, that our postmasters stop delivering mail when they don’t include proper addresses.  

Other posts about post offices and third places:

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Posted in Community Development, Quality of Life, Rural | Comments (4)