Last week’s popular post on the decline of the shopping mall drew robust comment about the societal consequences of losing that public forum.
One key idea readers introduced to the discussion was the Third Place.
Reader Sian writes:
[T]he mall was the last Third Place.
Previous and following generations definitely don’t get it, and just how central it was to our childhoods.
Boomers had malls, but they had already developed their social habits before they really took off, so for them it was just a place to shop. We were dragged there by our mothers so they could shop, and allowed to do whatever we wanted so long as we were back at the predetermined meeting place in 2 hours.
Later when we had our own transportation we could go there every day for a week, never buy a single damn thing and still have fun.
Don’t know what to do? Time to go hang out at the mall, get $5 of arcade tokens, grab an Orange Julius and laugh at people.
I worked at a KayBee Toy one holiday surge and it doesn’t even feel like a real memory.Watching the decline and slow death of the mall gives me a weird detached feeling. It was always inevitable, these crazy halls of consumerism could never have really lasted, could they? The idea that such a thing could exist in the modern day is simply ludicrous, and I don’t know whether to mourn the loss or marvel at the sheer assitude that could have believed that such a thing could ever work in the first place, if only for a few short decades.
But what is the third place?
In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, bars, clubs, community centres, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, makerspaces, stoops, parks, theaters, and opera houses, among others. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement and establishing feelings of a sense of place.
Robert Putnam addressed issues related to third place, but without using the term, in Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital (1995, 2000).
All of which raises the question: Where did third places go? Author JD Cowan posits an answer:
I do think the reason why malls ultimately went away was because the Baby Boomers in charge never understood why the younger generations (Gen X and Y primarily, Millennials might remember a bit of it from their childhood, but it wasn’t for very long) went there. I’m sure for females it was a mammon temple as much as it was a social club, but for males I think it was because it pretty much was the only place we could go to just do things. It wasn’t uncommon for men to spend little to no money while hanging out, because they were mostly there for the social experience. Not to say the mall was ideal, but it was the last remnant of the concept of a community center. With it gone, there isn’t really anything left.
Now, where people go today, I have no idea. To be honest, I’ve had this impression for a few years now that a lot of people just dropped out of society and disappeared. Anywhere I go it feels like there is about 1/3 of the people out there that there used to be around in public. This was even before the pandemic, but I think that was the final blow for a lot of them. With the rise of remote work and uber-style delivery services even going into grocery stores, I get the impression that an alarming amount of people have just checked out of the very idea of community and society.
I keep hoping we can work past this, but of all the directions to go in, this is most definitely not ideal.
Commenter VMDL598 shares this anecdote in regard to JD’s statement “Now, where people go today, I have no idea.”
This sentence sent a chill down my spine as I read it. It dredged up a memory of me and my family stopping at a mall food court early in the morning in a town in Colorado we were passing through. I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember sitting at a small table made for four people with my older sisters and commenting to my oldest one, (who I believe is Gen Y) how weirdly dead it felt in there. Everywhere I looked I saw areas where stores should have been, shut down escalators, and an architecture that was so bare that I felt as if we were sitting in the bleached skeleton of some long dead beast, the glass roof above us cementing that thought in my mind. I remember leaving and asking my sister, “what on earth is the appeal of the mall?” All I got was a sad look from her, and a shush from the sister slightly older than me.
Younger reader Idebont adds:
As someone who left high school right when the pandemic hit, I definitely feel the same way. It’s hard to describe, but the world as a whole feels a lot more… empty, even now. The pandemic definitely killed the last bits of social cohesion the West still had. You’ve also got this increase in anti-social behaviour; all of the societal chaos is definitely getting to people’s heads.
As far as the Baby Boomers’ role in the decline of third places , “Why don’t you get out of the house and go do something?” was a Boomer shibboleth second in hypocrisy only to “Get a degree, any degree; you want to end up flipping burgers?”
Because it seems like anytime their kids did find a social activity they liked outside the home, their parents rallied to quash it.
“Stop wasting time and money at that mall arcade. It’ll wreck your eyesight!”
“You’d better not be involved with that Dungeons & Dragons garbage. The TV news said it’s Satanic!”
“Don’t let me catch you messing around that skate park. I’m not paying the bill if you break your leg!”
Yet spending countless after-school hours staring at TV – much of which actually *was* diabolical, and risking injury and sleep deprivation at parent-approved or even mandated football practice, were just fine.
A case in your exact point: Right after CGZ, an X-er friend of mine opened an all-ages dance club on the outskirts of town. He did it because he noticed that teens had nothing to do on Saturday night and wanted to give them somewhere to have fun while providing unobtrusive supervision. To show he meant business about running a clean operation, he had security enforce a discreet but firm zero tolerance policy. Get caught with booze or drugs, and you’d be quietly taken to the office to wait for the cops.
City hall, egged on by the cops, had him shut down by slow-walking licenses and even passing an ordinance specifically targeting his business. No matter that he should have been grandfathered in. He eventually ran out of money trying to fight it in court, and that was that.
Near as I can tell, since Boomers suffer from generational solipsism, they tend to view their kids as life accessories or extensions of themselves. Also beset with sloth, they sought the surest and easiest ways to control their offspring. TV was the ideal solution. But when even the tube started warning about its own negative effects (see Dinosaurs), totally managed extracurricular activities became the supplement of choice.
The mall may not have been the last of the third places, but it does seem like the powers that be are doing their best to stamp them all out.
Which makes a grim kind of sense. Because if you’re part of a ruling class that’s overseeing pre-French Revolution levels of economic chaos, getting rid of the salons and coffee houses is probably in your best interests.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to find somewhere else to go.
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“Now, where people go today, I have no idea.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried in frustration over this. I know I’m an introvert, but even I need a little socialization outside the house a couple hours out the week. Even I’m starting to get miffed people want to outpace me at becoming a hermit. Though I personally have less desire to socialize because of the poor track record of my peers to get together and also just the lack of social opportunities that appeal to me in general.
My social anecdote views it this way: we have all the right pieces on the board to keep people at home. People I know are too busy, too tired, and live too far away to hang out on a frequent basis. Then there’s the issue of people being straight up liars. They can’t even keep their word when they say they’ll be there; the day of, they’ll send that famous text “Sorry man, something came up, I can’t hang out today.” – in some cases I’ve had ‘friends’ flake on me the day of because they wanted to hang out with one of their other friends more. That kind of betrayal makes you really give up on the idea of having friends and socializing outside the internet.
Side note: at least now I do have better quality friends who make time when asked, but they still live too far away and are usually too busy to hang out frequently, but to their credit, they’re busy raising families, no foul there.
Stack that with the rigorous demands of having a job, your average person has little energy or time for much else. To accommodate the low energy, convenience has crept its way into our lives. You can have anything brought to you at the touch of a smart phone; not just food or material goods, but entertainment and communication as well. Why should anyone has reason to leave their houses?
Convenience is the silent killer of our society.
“I do have better quality friends who make time when asked, but they still live too far away and are usually too busy to hang out frequently, but to their credit, they’re busy raising families, no foul there.
Stack that with the rigorous demands of having a job, your average person has little energy or time for much else”
The eternal business of society has become a factor. I wanted all my kids to hang out with other kids. Mostly, they have become too busy to do so. And if even if they did there is precious little of social spaces left.
Bars are still everywhere, but that’s hardly ideal for adults or the younger set. My youngest daughter has made a close friend, but she’s an hour away. She talks over the Internet with her. Her youth formation is mostly these days a managed way to hang out with other young Catholics.
I have friends from church, and all of them are so busy that I’m lucky to sneak in any time at all. It takes formally planning it just to have it happen. It seems that the simple of pleasure of just talking about nothing and everything has simply vanished.
Yet somehow, the people who used to flake on me most, had no problem making plans with another person the day of 5 minutes before they were meant to meet up. Meanwhile, I had to plan a week in advance and follow up multiple times just to get rejected last minute.
That’s the mind boggling mystery to me.
A great irony of our age is that we have all this technology to “connect” us, be it a car to drive places or social media to engage, but we’ve never been more alone.
The old Manosphere guys used to call out women for flaking, but the last few generations of men give “I have to wash my hair” types a run for their money. The seeming inability of Zoomer, Millennial, Gen Y, and even some Gen X men to be where and when they say they’ll be is epidemic.
I don’t know if their parents, teachers, and bosses never taught them this, but here’s a remedial crash course on punctuality. If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. If you’re late, there’s no excuse. Lateness is the best way to show contempt for someone else’s time.
Nor is “I had to run an errand on the way” an excuse, especially if it’s a side trip you make often. You should know how long it takes, so it’s on you to leave that much earlier to still arrive on time.
This is a real problem. I’ve had to mention more than a few times that I really don’t care what the problem is, show some respect for my time. Keep promises or don’t make them in the first place.
I would make exception for serious problems coming up, but I’ll be honest: those are never the reason for the flaking.
What’s extra frustrating is most of those guys probably make a point of getting to work on time, yet they treat a friend they ostensibly want to spend time with worse than their boss.
About all you can do is take each one aside individually and say, “Hey, man. You’re busy. I respect that, and I know your life doesn’t revolve around me. That said, there’s other stuff I could be doing, too, and short notice cancellations put people in a bind. If you’d rather do something else or have to call off, do me a favor and let me know ASAP from now on so we can both course correct. Thanks.”
Anyone who refuses that reasonable request may not be worth associating with.
Which is why I have few friends and don’t give any new person much slack.
I’ve learned to not let tardiness anger me because I get it, stuff happens on the road and in Louisiana, the roads can be clear the second you walk out the door and then turn disastrous 5 minutes into your drive.
In charity, I just expect to be in the know if you’re gonna be late. Barring sickness, death, or family emergency, a person should be when and where they said they’d be. If something legit does pop up and you have to cancel, reschedule! Lots of people miss that last step, it’s a courtesy.
It drove me mad for years because I thought I was the problem (self ownership taken too far), but then I realized some people just suck and I deserve better. So I got better friends. Sure they live far away, but they’ve all been more reliable than my previous troupe of “friends”.
If I’m to take a best guess why people are like this in my generation, it’s because they have been so emotionally abused (bullying and dating), it’s deep seeded that you can’t trust anyone and relationships are just a convenience. That way if someone hurts you, it’s not like you truly wasted your time forming a bond with them. It’s like I say – everyone wants loyalty but no one wants to be loyal.
Your X-er friend’s mistake was to not bribe the mayor. Had he tithed a percentage of the dance club’s income to City Hall, the police themselves would have become his security.
You’re right. But he hadn’t yet learned the proper level of cynicism back then.
I seem to recall my parents’ generation in general seemingly having a get together among themselves at least once a month or so. These were people with full-time jobs and families, yet they would always have the time and energy to spend one evening with their peers and neighbors, their kids in tow, and still manage to live normal lives during the rest of the week.
The difference today seems to be more work, less time, and not enough energy to spare, kids or not. Why go out and do anything when you can stay in and have everything brought to you?
Whatever their core reason might be, the prime point does seem to be that community isn’t even a priority with people to begin with. I don’t tend to hear many complaints about not being able to go to the neighborhood potluck because of overtime, for instance. Desire less work hours and request more stable jobs, sure, but what are you planning to do with that extra free time if you get it?
Everyone knows why, but they’re not allowed to say why.
This has been a real issue in my small (but explosively growing) Florida town.
Ok so we have a new kid-friendly sports bar and arcade on the main street that’s doing pretty well, at least it hasn’t turned into a vape shop like all the other failed businesses in town.
I’m always hearing complaints that there’s nothing to do in town (especially for singles) and it’s absolutely true.
This town never got a mall, it was really quite small until 6 years ago, and by then malls were definitely dead. There’s no neutral social ground here, unconnected to a specific activity like pool or bowling, and I think people notice. Whether they’ll be able to do anything about it is another matter.
I know there was a lot of stuff going on when the malls died. But when I was a kid, our tiny local mall was still a nice place to go: the architecture was dated, but effective, and kind of fun. The central space in the wide avenues between shops was full of little half-walls, raised flowerbeds, nooks with benches that offered a sort of eddy out of the noise and traffic, water fountains, and a little puppet theater that ran every hour on weekends, plus a little playground recessed into the floor (we called it the “play-hole”). The food court had two or three towering cages full of budgies. At the central hallway juncture, you could go up three steps to a little coffee shop surrounded by a half-wall that gave a good view down the three hallways– a great place to get a hot chocolate and wait for the rest of the family.
At some point in the 90s, somebody had the bright idea to rip out all of these silly bits of architectural whimsy and replace them with profit-generating stuff: a kiosk selling wind chimes or stinky candles every eight feet, and where the coffee place was, there’s now a dumb VR ride and a bungee trampoline thing that makes you sign a waiver and pay $30 a pop to bounce around for three minutes. The noise level went up significantly without all the flowerbeds and fountains acting as sound baffles and white noise. Now it’s just aggressively and chaotically loud. Everything that made it an aesthetically pleasant place got ripped out and the space jammed with tacky crap begging for your money and attention. The original mall was a place you could reasonably bring a book, buy a coffee, and sit out in the main thoroughfare for a couple hours waiting for your wife and tweens to go buy school clothes. After the remodel, it was a place no sane person wanted to linger at all. If you need something there, you sigh, you plan your route for maximum efficiency, and get in and out as quickly as possible. You would never meet friends there.
I expect that decision was made due to declining profits– the local shops were no longer making enough to afford the rent and moved out. Fewer people were coming. Target got installed right across the street. But the remodel put a stake through the heart of that ailing retail venue. The only part that’s still open is the second-run movie theater, and only because they had an ironclad contract through to the end of time. They’re the only thing keeping the entire property from being sold to developers, and the owners are pretty hacked about that.