Yeah, the closest place around here that would qualify for me is the local craft brewery (also in Seattle). There are neighbourhood bars but almost none of those in our neighbourhood are kid-friendly (and to be honest, in my kid-free days I wouldn’t have wanted to go to the kid friendly ones either)
Well, colour me an elitist. I just can’t stomach cheap mass-produced lagers any more. Besides which, are the craft beers really any more expensive?
To be honest, though, I don’t go out much any more anyway. Too old, too lacking in time and disposable income, too misanthropic. Once I get home from work the last thing I want to do is go out again.
Just you wait until the millennial generation has been married for a few years. They’ll be back. The can’t go straight home every night once they know their second job begins the second they walk through the door.
I’ve been working on a paper about third places so this is pretty fresh in my mind.
The most important thing about Oldenburg’s notion of third places is that it is build on a nostalgic view of the past. Think about his first quality: It’s a “leveler,” meaning it’s inclusive and doesn’t differentiate based on social status.
When was there ever a place that was truly inclusive and allowed anyone in regardless of sex, race, age, sexuality or some other criteria? In an interview a year or two ago he was asked for an example of the most egalitarian place and he said the soda fountain.http://hazelkahan.com/the-great-good-place-ray-oldenburg-2/ I’m sure those who participated in sit-ins protesting segregated soda fountains in the 1950s and 1960s would disagree that everyone was welcome.
Some people have mentioned the internet or other online spaces but Oldenburg explicitly says online spaces aren’t third places. As recently as an interview in 2011 he is quoted as saying, “I have objected to the common idea these days that there can be virtual third places, that you can do it electronically. There is no comparison, in my mind, between the joys of getting together, of the face-to-face enjoyment and banter. You can’t really compare that with electronic [social networking].”
I think he is wrong but I’m saving that for the paper…
People seem to long for a place like Cheers, in “Cheers”, but everything invented so far seems to fall short…bars are full of alcoholics, Starbucks is Starbucks, and…and that’s about it.
With the Starbucks revolution of the last couple decades, why aren’t we all sitting around coffee shops? I realize some of us do. But do we do it in a way that matches Oldenburg’s criteria, listed above? I go to the same coffee shop in my town a couple times a week, but I don’t know anyone there. I couldn’t pick out a “regular” if you paid me. God forbid I start up a conversation with one of them.
Living in a mostly rural area that has more than one Starbucks, they tend to be the coffee place nestled in another business, and the tables are full of people who are either studying, or telecommuting. Sometimes both.
Telecommuting is the reason why some of us aren’t at that Third Place. What, you’re awake? You’re at work. You have a smartphone? You’re at work. The place you frequent has a “check your smartphones at the door” policy? Consider your priorities before the next employee evaluation.
(I’m tempted to launch a Kickstarter for a chain of coffeeshops with no wifi and bouncers that confiscate smartphones at the door.)
Yeah…as long as you don’t want people who are actually working…
Depends on the area you’re in. In a college town, yeah, it’s got a lot of braindead “bros” who have no visible means of support. If it’s in a rural area, it’s a great place to get a knuckle sandwich from an angry alcoholic.
We’re so starved for face-to-face communication that we can justify it only as a byproduct of professional accommodation.
I am not starved for face-to-face communication, and I can’t be the only one. That shit takes energy, and I never know where to look, and often accidentally dart my eyes to people’s crotches. I don’t think I’m the only one, and I don’t think it’s just the introverted. Ubiquitous digital media has given us the ability to take in multiple information streams at once and prioritize how much attention we pay to each based on how interesting each is at any given moment. In addition, it’s curated by us individually, and thus is typically new and interesting information. Face-to-face conversations sometimes feel like being forced to watch a YouTube video where a talking head just… talks. No cutaways, no illustrations, no diagrams, no infographics. Lord help me if the talking head is not very animated, is in poor lighting, or has terrible grammar.
No need for a bouncer. Just line the walls with well-grounded metal foil, or put the area underground, with microwave-absorbing paint on the stairwell walls.
And the place could be named, drumroll please, The Faraday Cage!
…as of no-laptops policies, I consider them weird. When I am somewhere with others, we quite often have an open laptop on hand, to look up things, take notes, fire comments away to those not present, or discuss something. It is the LCD-screen equivalent of a suitcase full of papers; nothing more, nothing less.
I’m lucky, I live in walking distance of one of Newcastle’s last proper pubs. It hasn’t been painted in decades, it sells proper beer and everyone, even strangers is friendly, and, AND it has a free jukebox with things like Voivod and the Dead Kennedys on it.
There used to be a coffee house in Portsmouth NH called the Elvis Room. It was the best place ever. Kitchy decor years before hipsters, blank books where you could write notes or sketch, overstuffed couches, great coffee, amazing concerts at night. On a daily basis, you could walk in and see punks and skinheads hanging out with young Republicans, a 19 year old eco-warrior comparing notes with a 60 year old Deadhead, corporate suits having a lunch meeting, and teenagers playing M:tG.
I just needed to eulogize the place for a moment.
Anyway, I worry that we started with the kids and moved out from there. We banned skateboarding, harrassed mall rats, cracked down on any place teenagers could just hang out and be. A lot of the modern dependence on social media is a direct result of this- Because we’ve left young people with nowhere else to spend time unsupervised.
I think it started with this attitude and bled out to adults- We now need a “legitimate reason” to be somewhere, rather than just being there to be social and enjoy ourselves. Do you have money to be shopping? No? Then get out of the mall because you’re loitering. Are you working on your laptop or having a business lunch? No? Then take your $4 coffee and make some room for real customers.
I wonder if we’re not going to see a massive resurgence of public spaces in a few years when the Millennials start running things.
First of all: I love this modified Nighthawks! Any chance it can be made available as a print or at least a standalone JPG?
As to the subject: I think there’s a few things going on here. As an introvert, I have always found it hard to walk into any social arena and just “drop down” with acquaintances who are already there. Maybe the one exception was finding pals in college dining halls. So: do old British Men’s Clubs count? All the members know each other, and maybe they chat or maybe they just sit in their own chairs, quietly enjoying being in the same room as their friends and class counterparts.
I use my local makerspace (Nova Labs) for this, and others there do too… sure, we’re all working on projects, but more often than not we’re helping each other out, or working within earshot and talking (and drinking the occasional beer). There’s no charge to show up if there’s a member present (members have keys to open/close the space), so it’s fairly egalitarian.
This isn’t really such a problem in New Zealand (there’s a reasonable coffee culture) but the event that most meets the criteria is the Friday (and Wednesday during summer) night markets.
A massive cross section of the population shows up regularly to eat a wide variety of street food and listen to entertainers
Oh, then you’re just not trying hard enough. Though in fairness, these days you’d get arrested for things that used to get dealt with on a much more informal level.
This reminds me of my brother, who like me, grew up in Abu Dhabi. A lot of young people there, at least when I was younger, hang out at the mall. There are enough odd and idiosyncratic things about living there to fill a novel, and maybe I will someday, but I’m instead going to tell a story about what happened when he moved to the US with me. He went to visit a friend in another state, who worked part-time at a supermarket chain. He was outside waiting for his friend to get off work when a cop came out of nowhere.
“What are doing out here?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t do that here.”
“What?”
“You can’t be here doing nothing.”
“But… I’m not doing anything.”
“Exactly. You can’t do that here.”
And around they went for a bit before my brother walked off to do nothing elsewhere.
He was telling me the story and I was laughing, because my brother wasn’t old enough to remember when we lived in the US before moving to Abu Dhabi. He never read a “No Loitering” sign to wonder what the word meant. Hanging out and doing nothing was something you could still do where we were growing up. In a lot of ways our conversation reminded me of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, where the narrator describes an America where there is nowhere you can be for free, and how all property is private.
I’ve often wondered if there was ever really such a thing as a “third space.” I find that I sometimes feel like a prisoner at home. Part of this is personal baggage that I won’t get into, but it’s also in large part because I don’t have an answer to the question, “Where else can I be?” You can’t very well spend all day at a friend’s house, that’s inconvenient for them and an invasion of their privacy. Therein lies the utility of these spaces: You can be there indefinitely and socialize without worrying you’re inconveniencing anyone.
Our commercial culture is partly to blame, but not because the culture is commercial. The culture sixty years ago was also commercial, but it was a different idea of commerce. There was a time when commerce was about personal relationships more than throughput. At its higher levels, a lot of business dealings are still like that, but even that’s changing.
Once I get home from work the last thing I want to do is go out again.
