I am unable to figure out why for the variable place I am unable to make it a variable string, rather than a integer that will compile fine.
Basically, you have a type mismatch since the right-hand side returns a char while the left-hand side is expecting a String object.
I took the liberty of tweaking your code a bit.
If you can use primitives, better use them since creating unnecessary objects is wasteful. So used chars instead, and since I have chars now I took advantage of a switch.