I live in a small town of about 2000 people or so. There is no public space for people to simply hang out, just a couple of restaurants, a couple of stores and two gas stations.
There was a some fairly minor vandalism a few years ago, and the city decided that unsupervised teenagers and adults without kids were not allowed to be in the park. In this case the park consists of some grass, a basketball court, a covered concrete slap with picnic tables and some little-kid play equipment. They decided the park was only for small children accompanied by their mothers (yes, it was gendered, because this is the bible belt).
I can drive to the big town an hour away if I want to, but not everyone has that luxury. So, what do people do? Iām not sure, exactly, but my speculation is sex and drugs. And church.
I used to work with a very charming woman who was in rehab for a heroine addiction. She explained that where she grew up, a nearby small town, there was nothing to do unless you were super-involved in church. I asked her what people did if they werenāt. She said, āWell if you were like me there was just fucking and getting fucked-up. Thatās why Iām in rehab.ā
Iām grateful that I did my ill-advised sex/drug activities many years ago in a much larger town, so Iām not at all tempted to go that route again. Itās a trap.
Iām not sure Hopperās āNighthawksā is really the picture to use here. Hopper isnāt celebrating the diner depicted as a wonderful āthird placeā ā he is trying to capture the loneliness he saw in city life where people eat meals with strangers in seedy diners.
Nice article. After 27 years, my watering place is any AA meeting no matter where I am. Iāll even stand you to a cup of coffee, or a meal afterwards.
I think not enoughā¦ I seem to recall that I was making fun of the manager for being a dick to somebody ā he got out his little notebook and wrote down my name (which I spelled out so that he got it recorded correctly).
It worked ā I never did go back there.
So I signed-in just to make the same remark about watering holes being alive and well in Louisville, KY where people of all ages and incomes gather at neighborhood bars. This piece is a bit myopic speaking from an individual point of view rather than from data.
I got banned āfor lifeā from a place where the manager was known to be a dick to almost everyoneāincluding most of the wait staff. The bar was two blocks away from a college campus, but he was very open about his disdain for ācollege peopleāāstudents and staff, and his desire to only serve those who werenāt affiliated with the college.
Five years after I was banned I went back and found the place was under new management. I had kind of mixed feelings about that. On the one hand I was looking forward to seeing if the old manager would recognize me. On the other hand the atmosphere of the place had changed considerably for the better.
When I was last in Goring I met an ex English professor from oxford. We spent two and a half hours talking about cheese and cheese labels (he had collected 18,000 labels over the years). It was sincerely one of the best nights of my life.
Planktown in Springfield Oregon. Dan Schmidt, the bassist for The Daddies is the restaurant manager.
I think this is where we start to get at a real issue, because thereās a reason weāre clinging to this romanticized ideal of a community watering hole: it stands in for a lot of social structures that we have lost.
Years ago, I read an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich in the Nation, in which she talked about how in most US communities, churches are the only community resource available, and the only real supplier of social services. In part, churches have always had something of this role, but with the loss of government social services and community programs by labor unions and so forth, churches are often all thatās left.
My partner talked about the apparently idyllic small town, mostly built by counter-culture folks who moved there in the 60s, where in the 90s there was nothing for teenagers to do except to get stoned.
I just got finished reading the current issue of Jacobin Magazine, which had the theme of cities and urban planning. It was overall excellent. Most relevant here were two articles: The Suburbanization of the Working Class, on how historically in the US, workers, new immigrants, and the poor were concentrated in large cities, where it was relatively easy to organize and to secure social services; and Seize the Hamptons, on how spaces for recreation and socialization are being lost and should be reclaimed. Together, I think they put together a picture of how the disenfranchised have been physically isolated from each other, weakened by the loss of community both for recreation and for political action.
However, I want to say this attack on kidsā virtual communities as being a threat to real life community is incredibly out-of-touch and tiresome. The exact reason why so many kids in my generation retreat into cyberspace is to escape the piece of shit metropolitan wasteland of individualist consumerism weāve inherited as a supposed social landscape. So I think it is the other way around: the virtual always represents imaginative desires that canāt (currently) be manifested in physical meatspace. I believe the various social technology experiments are igniting the public youthās imagination for what post-internet meatspace community could look like beyond work, shopping, religion, and shoving convenience food down our esophagus.
A friend of mine and I have joked about how there should be an IRL /b/: A no-cost, wild-card kind of place where you can go when you donāt know where else to go. A place no one is too cool for, where everyone agrees to put up with each otherās nonsense, because you realize trying to constantly jump ship from each newly created clique-turned-ghetto is more work than just being patient with a crowd of knuckleheads for the occasional gem of a conversation.
Something else in my generation that I notice goes undetected by older folks is the development of a larger cultural vocabulary and a more modular cultural style. The Flynn effect is showing a steady increase in perceptual intelligence and a larger circle of empathy. These developments are increasing the possibility for an almost, dare I say, utopian cosmopolitan future.
Sorry for the rambly wall of text, but this is something Iām excited about being improved in the years to come. Youngsters are longing for connection in this kind of non-contractual āthird-placeā, and have already started moving back into the city with an open mind and renewed interest in building localism and community.
Itās that ease of asynchronous communication for me as well. Ahh the old days. Where are you Plastic.com?
For the non-drinkers, the public library can become that meeting space if the administration has the space and design sense to make it happen. Small libraries in the mountains that run along California, Oregon, and Washington were quite a lot of bright, airy spaces with newspapers and coffee stands next to public seating areas. People wanting more quiet went a little further into the stacks, and there was less of a hard line against food and liquid.
The post regarding colleges as a wholeāyes. UCSC did a great job of cultivating the tranquil as well as the loud and conversational. Kresge Study Center is second only to the engineering library. Lovely places just to be.
This is true, though it should be pointed out that itās intrinsically harder for some people than others. See: Aspergerās Syndrome.
It helps considerably with developing social connections, and if youāve developed a social connection with someone, that can make face to face communication a lot easier, at least by easing anxiety about it.
I have mild aspergers and ran a bbs for many years, meeting many long-term friends there and on the early Internet. I understand but folks still need to meet folks in the flesh in the end. Otherwise, you run the risk of turning into a shut-in.
I also suggest things like hackerspaces and (I dare say it) gaming groups to people like us. Places where geeks with social awkwardness are the norm tend to be a lot more tolerant of peopleās social anxieties.
