The city of Boston is famous for its third places — those cafes, community centers, and other public places that, as sociologist Ray Oldenburg observed, often increase communal ties by hosting “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”

From the Green Dragon Tavern — a public house located on Union Street which set the stage for the Boston Tea Party — to the setting of “Cheers”— the fictitious television show about a bar on Boston Common where locals from all walks of life socialize and create community — America’s “city of a hill” has a storied history of local, communal hubs where everyone knows your name.

Now, it is time to add a new third
place to Boston’s storied history of third places: the Johnson building of the main
branch of the Boston Public Library. Situated in the middle of the city itself,
the nation’s third-largest public library has been standing tall on Copley
Square since 1895.

Originally designed by McKim, Mead, and White, today the library houses a world-renowned set of manuscripts along with gallery space and a grand reading room. In the late 1960s, a huge addition was built by Philip Johnson in the brutalist style, making this facility not only the central lending library for Boston, but also one of the most hated spaces in the city. It was dark, disconnected from the street, and was often described as a fortress.

By the mid-2010s, it was decided that
the Johnson building needed a radical re-design, with the idea that the space “must become a lively cultural center for the city.” The
planners did just that, adding new windows looking onto the street, removing numerous
walls, and creating many spaces to read, learn, and engage with both reading
materials and members of the community.

The architects envisioned the library as “something that someone cannot only go to but pass through and inhabit as part of the city landscape, rather than being a cul de sac destination,” and they certainly delivered. The renovation, which was completed in 2016, created a place with public amenities that Americans actually want and are critical to creating community. Today, the library includes a business innovation center, a radio broadcasting studio for WGBH, numerous spaces for meetings, and a thriving café. The new Johnson facility is both dynamic and vibrant, and has become a “hot spot” anchoring a number of Boston neighborhoods, including the Back Bay and the South End, where locals line up before opening and look forward to going in.

A look at the numbers makes the impact of this change even more striking. Nationally, there has been a very real decline in library visitation: Research has found a 31 percent decline in public library use between 2000 and 2018. New survey work reveals that libraries are not significant to the lives of Americans whatsoever. Just 7 percent of Americans report visiting libraries weekly, while only 22 percent report visiting at least once or twice a month. Almost six in 10 (59 percent) Americans report they seldom or never visit their local public library, with 32 percent — the plurality in the sample — saying they never do. Libraries are not hubs in their local communities.

Turning
to Boston specifically, there has been a lot
of movement in terms of library visitations across the Boston system as a
whole. Between 2004 and 2019, an average of 3.6 million people visited Boston’s
libraries. During that time, the central library has seen a real change in the
number of patrons entering the building. In the nine years preceding the
renovation, the average number of visitors was roughly 1.5 million patrons. In
the three years following the renovation’s completion, the figure jumped
significantly to an average of about 1.9 million patrons — a 27 percent increase even as
library attendance across the country has been in steep decline. Boston created
a real third place and the community followed.

The city of Boston thoughtfully renovated
an older public space and in the process created a library that met the needs
and lifestyles of the community today. And unlike so many other libraries
around the nation, more people walked through the library’s door because of it.
Bostonians flocked to this new space, which has become a real third place in
the community — one with
amenities that Americans truly want when they are outside of work and home. Boston
has a proud and well-deserved reputation of creating meaningful places with
deep social capital, and other cities should take note of Boston’s Central
Library as a role model of how to transform struggling local libraries into
thriving public places.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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