Scottish Café

It's one of the reasons I was glad for the Union Society at my university. You had to be a member of the university, and then pay to join, so not exactly a public place, but it was great for this sort of thing. There were many occasions where we'd grab a light lunch there, spend a good 4 or 5 hours working on things together, then grab a pizza from a place just down the road to bring back[1]. It then had a bar that opened at 6, so you could have a few drinks before heading home.

You could do much the same in the local Starbucks, but the noise and how busy it was made it a bad place to work. The Union was generally quiet (and had an on-site library if you needed it), which was ideal. We also had a few supervisions in local pubs, but they'd generally only last an hour which sidestepped the drinking/taking up a table without buying drinks issues.

There were of course study spaces we could have used in college, but not having to worry about disturbing people as you were discussing things (as most people there weren't working) and having drinks/hot food available made it a much nicer place to work.

[1] Which you weren't really meant to do given they were selling food, but the staff let us get away with it.

I'm confused...What you're asking for is a café? There are a lot of places like that.

It probably depends on the city. My fiance who is in Singapore saw this article and mentioned on one occasion she was trying to work in a Starbucks with a classmate and they were asked to leave to make room for other customers. Singapore feels like a pretty crowded city though, many of the public spaces like the library are usually fully booked.

Quite a lot of postwar US research lead can be attributed to that being where people survived. The thriving pre war intellectualism of Poland, Hungary and so on was largely obliterated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) : those who escaped.

Just the name of the cafe.

Actually they have started in Cafe Roma but it has been too crowded and noisy and Banach decided to move to the other side of the street to Szkocka (Scottish) Cafe instead. Another reason Roma's owner wasn't keen to put on a tab. The Szkocka owner - Mr. Brettschneider was more friendly to mathematicians.

https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433

The food in Szkocka wan't particularly good in Banach's opinion and some older mathematicians (Hugo Steinhaus) preferred bakery of Ludwik Zalewski at Akademicka 22 which was famous for excellent cakes delivered even to Warsaw by plane.

Szkocka Cafe had been also frequented by journalists from Radio Lwów and cattle traders. The Cattle Market had been long time moved further from the city center but traders have liked Szkocka for closing trades.

Szkocka was also the home of Klub Konstrukcjonalistów - a discussion and literary club focused on aesthetics.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w

Lwów had its share of coffee houses - "Cariton" (dawna "Muzeum" obok Muzeum Przemysłowego), "Centralna" (obecnie na rogu ul. Jagiellońskiej i Trzeciego Maja), "Europejska" (róg ul. Czarnieckiego i placu Bernardyńskiego), "Grand" (dawna "Teatralna"), "George", "Imperial" (ul. Legionów 5), "Louvre", "Palermo" (ul. Rutkowskiego, róg ul. Kamińskiego), "De la Paix", "Roma", "Rouge" (ul. Mikołaja), "Sewilla" (pl. Bernardyński, róg ul. Piekarskiej), "Union" ("Hostynnycia"), "Victoria" (ul. Rejtana), "Warszawa", "Wiedeńska"

https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html

Google Translated > I also do not know where the idea of christening one of the cafes came from, according to the frescoes inside it, "Szkocka". Personally, this name reminds me of the famous jokes about skimpy Scotsmen and has always appealed - probably against the intentions of the host - to my savings, and maybe that is why it was partially closed for the time being.

Google Translated > "Szkocka": it has always been the place with the most heterogeneous audience among all Lviv cafes. University professors and couples in love, old gossipers and lonely newspaper readers, bibliophiles and billiards, Jewish intelligentsia and students from the nearby Academic House, all states and spheres, classes and races, religions and preferences lived here in harmony, not with each other, but next to each other, filling an average of half of the room. So "Scotch" was always especially nice thanks to the fact that it was never too full and never too empty. Somehow its capacity was happily measured. Various secessionists from the neighboring "Roma" were a large part of its audience; those who for one reason or another - sometimes because of oppositionism itself, and sometimes as a result of overpopulation - left their home tables in "Roma" and emigrated to "Szkocka", trying to establish a new, independent existence here.