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.
