On Calder Way in downtown State College, tucked down a flight of steps, W.C. Clarke’s Cheese Shoppe and Coffee Roasters is easy to miss if you don’t know where to look. Inside, dozens of varieties of cheese sit alongside an extensive selection of coffees, teas, and local products, a combination that works surprisingly well. The shop has been part of the State College rhythm for decades, and on most days you’ll find a group of regulars out front, settled in like they’ve never been anywhere else.
That’s the heart of a third place. A third place isn’t where you go to get something done. It’s where you go to be around people, with nowhere else you’d rather be.

“You better learn it fast, you better learn it young… ’cause someday never comes.”
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1972
So went the lyrics composed back during another era of rapid change and political upheaval; if only they were true. Throughout our society (and around the world really), including here in our lovely little (though less “little” than it once was) college town, people are reckoning with challenges that had always felt like problems we might have to face someday.
Well, “someday,” which for years and even decades felt more abstract than real, is now visible on the horizon.