The Last of the Third Places

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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