This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business—what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy—but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house.
We talked about the upcoming deer season, and upon learning that I was a new hunter, the two guys showed me a rifle that was kept in another room. On the train back to Philadelphia, where I was living at the time, I felt much more euphoric about the unexpected hangout than I did about the supposedly spiritual experience that had preceded it. To me, the ideal hangout has a few components: spontaneity, purposelessness, and a willingness among all parties involved to go wherever the conversation leads them.
This one met all the criteria. Two strangers took a chance on spending an hour with an outsider—a tiny woman of ambiguous age who is sometimes told she resembles the Disney character Spinelli —who was enticed by a simple sign. They had no reason to expect we would share common ground. In my early 20s, I was unacquainted with the term third place , though the hope of someday becoming a regular at one was the primary reason I moved from the Florida suburbs to New York City.
I spent most of my teenage years listening to whiny guitar-based music that drove home that exact point. Read: Revenge of the suburbs. But these days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities. In , about two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorite local place they went to regularly. That two-thirds has since dropped to a little more than half, according to the survey. Now might be as good a moment as ever for many vaccinated Americans to fraternize, but those who are older or immunocompromised still have real concerns about the coronavirus.
When city dwellers were largely confined to crowded tenements, they were forced out into the world, which often meant hanging out with strangers in taverns.
