As I sat down with a cup of chai in a mug so big it almost resembled a bowl, I surveyed the packed Compass Coffee.
The cafe — which opened its doors in College Park in January — featured students pecking away at their laptops and intermittently sipping lattes or cappuccinos out of ceramic mugs. Despite having opened a few weeks ago, the shop seemed like an instant hit among students searching for a subliminal third space.
Defined as a social environment separate from the home or the workplace, the third space underwent a renaissance after the COVID-19 pandemic. As quarantine whipped us into a craze and then pushed us out of the house, our desire for new environments intensified.
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The cafe appears to be the favored “third space” — the cooler the aesthetic, the more desirable. Trendy spots such as Maman, a French café that began in SoHo, or Tatte Bakery and Café, that expanded from Massachusetts to Maryland, provide an upscale, beautified ambience for people to chat or work. With the plethora of University of Maryland cafes in nearly every academic building, students can also have one hand on their laptop and the other on a grande mocha.
That’s the favored theory. But social psychologists seem to forget about our society’s deep, long relationship with cafes. Since its inception, the cafe has served as the nucleus for creativity, creating and creations themselves. J.K. Rowling wrote her first draft of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in Scottish cafes, according to multiple travel websites. Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka frequented Café Louvre in Prague, while Simone de Beauvoir wrote Jean-Paul Sartre wrote at Café de Flore in Paris, according to the cafe’s websites.
Sitting at a communal counter at the center of the cramped Compass Coffee on Knox Road, I’m transported to these global literary hubs. Although my English major brain may romanticize these places, it’s easy to see how great works were written and great ideas swapped inside a coffee shop’s four walls.
There’s a professor sitting with a briefcase grading papers, a girl scribbling something ferociously in a blue notebook and someone else nodding their head along to something in their headphones while coding on a laptop. No matter what cafe-goers are doing, there’s a sense of creative urgency — perhaps an inadvertent effect of the caffeinated drinks — that is inspiring and mobilizing.
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Even though College Park cafe-goers are probably not exchanging ideas such as the Theory of Relativity or the subject of the next internationally acclaimed novel, we’re feeding off each other’s ambition and drive. The cafe setting removes our silos, letting us work together in comfortable silence, which is quite motivating.
There is something wildly romantic and artistic about how much possibility a coffee shop possesses. It could inspire a poem, scrawled on a paper napkin or be the scene of a nervous couple on a first date, all set to the soundtrack of whirring espresso machines and clinking spoons.
