The Sermon on the Coffee House
Rev. Nutting of Plymouth Church argues that Seattle's saloons won't go out of business until the city provides better alternatives for working men, like public reading rooms and coffee houses.
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The services at Plymouth church last night embraced an episode in the form of an explanation from the pulpit by Rev. Nutting of his sermon of the previous Sunday on 'How Men Spend Their Sundays.' Mr. Nutting said: 'There must be coffee houses in the busiest and most populous parts of the town. You can make up your mind to this: That the saloon will never die until you furnish something to take its place. This must be done on behalf of the men who have no homes and no families. These institutions will support themselves, or nearly so. There need not be any preaching at all in these coffee houses. The preaching is the coffee, the papers and the books.' He argued that young men were being drawn into saloons by loneliness and a lack of respectable leisure spaces, calling for extended library hours and down-town Y.M.C.A. branches as vital civic necessities.
“The saloon will never die until you furnish something to take its place.”
This 1892 plea for 'third places'—non-commercial spaces for socializing—mirrors contemporary Seattle debates about the loss of community hubs in a rapidly densifying city. Nutting’s focus on the 'average man' as the beneficiary of urban infrastructure echoes today's focus on equitable access to public amenities.
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