Don Martin

The hierarchy that exists outside of that place doesn't really exist inside of the bar, right?

When we talk about third places, people uplift Cheers or the Neighborhood Bar or something very like it as a platonic ideal of the third place.

Ray Oldenburg did that in The Great Good Place, and he really idealized the idea of the Neighborhood Bar.

The problem is neighborhood meetup spaces...

generally speaking, are disappearing from society as we continue to prioritize homes over mixed use spaces.

So as more and more land is developed into residential neighborhoods, you'll notice it's seas of houses, maybe some sidewalks connected to other seas of houses, maybe connected to estuaries of roads off into a highway somewhere, and then commerce and the neighborhood bar is actually 20 miles away.

Because the alternative would be if you lived in a residential neighborhood, finding out that three doors down, the old Johnson place is getting turned into a neighborhood bar, which I think would freak people out in 2025, where it's like a bar serving alcohol.

where kids could see.

Like people had this idea that living anywhere near any form of commerce is going to bring in drugs and alcohol and crime and the unhoused and people not like me and that's a terrible idea and I want to live in a sea of houses.

But the thing is, we also know that those make people very bored and unfulfilled and increase loneliness.

All of this is in conversation with what is a third place?

What is a third place in the modern day?

What do we do to create third places at all when it comes to the American mall and our

idealizing of it as a third place, we've already entered into a negotiation of what is a third place?

What are we willing to call a third place?

No, it doesn't meet all eight.

But basically we are entering into a negotiation where we have decided which version of capitalistic enterprise fits with our version of nostalgia.

And in all of that conversation is where do we like to be and where do we like to hang out?

The mall, like I said,

isn't and never really was intended to be a third place.