Panera And Public Space

Trying to untangle risk aversion, fear, and unfamiliarity

I’ve found that I enjoy sitting in a particular Panera Bread location in Rockville, Maryland. It’s one of the older standalone stores with a lot of seating, and a lot of walls/quasi-rooms, so you can just set up somewhere and be anonymous.

The coffee is cheap and decent (though one of the coffee urns always seems to empty) and the seating is comfier than a typical cafe. The place does get crowded during lunch, and on some mornings, but it never fills up to the point where I feel bad taking up a table for hours.

But there’s a limit on how long I can stay, because there are, according to online reviews, only two set of electric plugs in the whole place, only one of which I’ve actually found. That one is by a four-person booth, the table for which happened to be broken a couple of visits ago.

A store employee told someone it was broken and asked her to sit somewhere else, turned it sideways to mark it out of use, and left. Someone else came by a few minutes later, looked at the sideways table like “What moron left the table like this?” and sat down for a bit. Then someone else, who I told the table was broken. Then someone else, who I didn’t bother to tell because I’m not a store employee.

Finally the employee wrote a “Broken” sign and taped it to the table. But that was where only one of two plugs in the whole store was, so a fellow who seemed like a regular (I saw him again on my next visit)—watching TV on a tablet, and carrying around some kind of USB-powered lava-lamp-looking light, joined forces with another customer, and dragged out the broken table from the booth and swapped it with a good table, so he could set up with the plug.

This necessitated a scolding from a female employee, who the man appeared to know, and who he promised profusely but aggressively that he would never disrespect her. Then the employee who had drawn the “Broken” sign noticed, and came over and said, Didn’t I write a sign to not use this table? The man said, I didn’t use the table, I moved it, I need the plug, Jenny¹ said it’s okay, the employee said “Well I’m not Jenny,” etc. etc. The employee left and the man remained plugged in with his gadgets.

He seemed to know another one of the regulars, who was walking around a bit. They stood and chatted in the middle of floor for a bit. Other people do this thing, walking slowly but with a kind of nervous energy around the store. I don’t know what’s going on, exactly, but it’s enough to perk up my antennas.

Now I recognize I’m just describing…normal life as it plays out in a semi-public space. But what I realize, too, is that in Northern Virginia, or in central New Jersey where I’m originally from, I almost never see this kind of thing. People rarely ever act aimless in a store, or strike up weird conversations, or have to be told off. There’s a hustle and an intent to do your business and get out. Much of what is just normal hanging out and chatting codes as loitering, or making trouble of some sort.²

One of the hardest lessons of urbanism for me was to learn that my own sense of slight discomfort and alert in any place less affluent and buttoned-up than I was used to was my own bias operating, more than it was the discernment of any real risk to me.

I remember kind of absorbing by osmosis that feeling that any place a bit louder or more crowded than where I was from was, if not a “bad” area, then a place you visited temporarily, knowing you could always return to your refuge. “That place makes me feel uncomfortable/out of my element/overstimulated/etc.” became that’s the kind of place that makes you feel bad.

Now I know my parents liked their large-lot semi-rural suburbia—they had moved, in their lives separate and together, from New York City to Long Island to rural-exurban New Jersey. I always thought I liked it too. I do like it, and I like to return home. But I also wonder how much of what I’ve always thought of as my own natural anti-urban bias was just some kind of post-hoc explanation of the discomfort I felt as a kid in places I wasn’t used to. Whether those discrete childhood experiences imperceptibly became a general idea I held.

Seeing that your ideas are often just intellectualized versions of your feelings is difficult and humbling. From a recent piece, I’ll give you another example:

I’m also aware that some of my bristling at talk about self-denial or delayed gratification or work ethic might be my own interpretation of what people mean. When I sometimes write things like “Some people think you aren’t working unless you’re miserable” or “You’re cheating if you’re making a thing easier” or “Any achievable human effort is insufficient,” all I might be doing is describing the subjective frustration of being reminded to turn off the video games and study my SATs. That was what I heard. I genuinely wonder how much of what I take to be other people’s attitudes about my life is a sort of time capsule of my own immature reactions to their advice.

But to the question of being in public with other people, I have a couple more thoughts. One is related to this abstracting of feelings into ideas.

In a recent social media post, I noted that one of the reasons I felt uncomfortable in cities as a kid was because my parents emphasized that I should never do things like point at the weird fellow and go “MOMMY WHAT IS THAT MAN DOING?”

From that experience of being scolded for pointing or gawking, I derived the idea that cities were places where you couldn’t just relax and let your hair down. Someone commented, sensibly, that it’s just good manners not to point or stare at people, and that it was kind of silly for me to have seen this as the city’s imposition on my freedom and not just, you know, how you should behave in public. In other words, I had turned the reality that politeness matters more when you’re in closer proximity to people into the idea that cities unfairly constrained, I guess, my freedom to be rude. (Of course, I don’t point and yell at people now.)

But I do think there’s a counterpoint to that. It’s that, regardless of the manners question, the more crowded/intense/“city-like”/etc. a place is, the higher the likelihood seems of running into “characters,” or finding yourself in some kind of “situation.”

And while the vast majority of these people—the odd people, the people doing something strange, coming up to you, milling around, giving employees a hard time, etc.—will be harmless, and the best approach is just to treat them like human beings or else ignore them, each one of these situations has a fractional chance of going south quickly. And merely that awareness—apart from any actual bad outcome—is enough to keep you in a state of high alert, which is then very difficult to perceive as anything other than “the city” exerting this kind of anxiety on you.

Of course, when I say “you,” I mean me. Or myself before I thought about these things from an urbanist perspective, anyway. But the point is, risk is very personal, comfort zone is very personal, and I don’t think I’m wrong to feel ever-so-slightly more alert in that Panera in Rockville than I do in my favorite bougie coffee shop in Fairfax County.

There really is a fuzzy but real correlation between richer and less dense places being safer, or “safer.” But that’s just one side of the ledger. How much do you deny yourself in culture and proximity and opportunity and human interest for fractional and maybe illusory decreases in the risk of a “situation”?

The second thing I realize from all of this is that I think I have an idea in my head that it is possible to live somewhere and simply remove all friction, inconvenience, and discomfort from daily life, but also have everything you want. It’s like the meme where the dog says, “Pls throw?? NO TAKE!! ONLY THROW.”

Or like this Venn diagram poking fun at NIMBYs:

In so many ways, the whole idea of urbanism—and density, and living together with other people—is a challenge to our baser human nature. And it’s funny how it illustrates the truth of that Boomer favorite: you can’t always get what you want.

---

Related Reading:

That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

Unnerved in the City

Benches for Whom?

What We Mean By “Open Streets”

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,500 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!

1. Probably not her real name, which I didn’t catch. She didn’t say it was okay; she just let him do his thing.

2. My mother had a friend who visited the city from out on Long Island or somewhere, and he saw people out on the street at night playing cards at little folding tables, and apparently that scared him. Like, What are those people doing out on the street? It’s amazing how the psychology of suburban single-use properties can really mess with you.