Posts Tagged ‘south dakota magazine’

Higher Grounds at South Dakota Magazine

June 4th, 2009

Although it’s not Wall Drug - at least not yet - Howard’s Higher Ground Coffee is fast becoming famous as a “third place.”  Yesterday, it was featured on South Dakota Magazine’s blog. 

I actually knew the post was coming because Bernie Hunhoff and Paul Higbee had stopped by the office last week, shortly after stopping in at Higher Grounds.  We chatted briefly about the role of third places in “building community” and their importance to community development. It was a fun conversation.

As I read Bernie’s post, I was captivated by his photograph, and a thought popped into my mind:  wouldn’t it be fun to create a photostream of third places in rural communities?  If anyone is interested in this type of collaborative project or has ideas about how to accomplish it, I’d appreciate hearing from you.  I’ll spend some time thinking about how “we” can accomplish this as community of people who are committed to rural communities.

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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)