41–50 of 109 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at. Can't have those, the homeless might use them to avoid suffering for a few minutes and be visible, and that makes people angry.
Around these parts it's more like a few hours to a few days but it is still a fair point. One answer would be to build and support more places, enough for everyone to enjoy.
> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke. These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a d…
However I would still say the best way to avoid making friends is to avoid being in places where strangers hang out. Places where you come into low pressure contact with strangers are places where you get to know people — and where you get to know people, is where you find friends. Going to those places is just a way to increase your chances of talking to someone you like by increasing the number of people tou are talking to.
And the place for you might not be a cafe or a pub, it might be a library, a golf court, a ski hut, an art gallery, a vacation resort, a park, a camping place, .. you get the idea places where people hang out and don't do everyday stress stuff. So no train station platforms or grocery stores.
But places that are especially unsuited are places without strangers, so: your home (unless you invite strangers), deserts or other remote places.
> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke. These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a d…
You don't need to spend all your time somewhere for it to become a decent third space. You just need to go regularly, at a similar enough time that you start building rapport with the people who also go at the same time. If you go to the gym or bar for an hour or two after work every weekday, for example, you'll quickly notice that the same people are there with you. Interact with them enough, and these people form t…
Hell. No.
I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to.
Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.
> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke. These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to spend all your time somewhere for it to become a decent third space. You just need to go regularly, at a similar enough time that you start building rapport with the people who also go at the same time. If you go to the gym or bar for an hour or two after work every weekday, for example, you'll quickly notice that the same people are there with you. Interact with them enough, and these people form t…
In threads like this, people often bring up gyms as social spaces. Hell. No. I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to. Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to spend all your time somewhere for it to become a decent third space. You just need to go regularly, at a similar enough time that you start building rapport with the people who also go at the same time. If you go to the gym or bar for an hour or two after work every weekday, for example, you'll quickly notice that the same people are there with you. Interact with them enough, and these people form t…
In threads like this, people often bring up gyms as social spaces. Hell. No. I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to. Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In NYC, people are nearly all strangers and in a big hurry Maybe you've only been in midtown Manhattan? I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood where we bump into people we know constantly and no-one is rushing around madly.
You got it exactly! Every time in NYC, I've spent nearly my entire time in Manhattan, excluding one trip to my friend's folks' place on Staten Island. That seemed much better in terms of the odds serendipitous bumping into friends, but still less so than mountain state.
It's a pretty well known phenomenon here that you see people you know (or, say, notice the same person twice in the same day in totally different parts of the city) way more often than you'd expect. Sure, 10x as many people live here, but you see 100x as many people each day.
The "people who don't live here assume that residents are rushing around places that look like Midtown 24/7" is another pretty well known phenomenon, fwiw
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should really get out of NYC sometime. Pretty much every city and even mid-sized town in the US has what you're describing. A lot of it is far easier to navigate than Brooklyn as well.
No, no they don’t. That commenter explicitly called out museums etc. You are not going to find that level of museum in a mid sized town.
Totally skewed to think that NYC/L.A./Chicago are the only places you can raise kids in a bustling urban community.
Anything Cincinnati-sized or bigger will do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you talked about having ice cream and going to parks, so I'd say yes pretty much everywhere in the US has that. Other places are also much more walkable than Brooklyn, tons of smaller cities have started focusing on revitalizing their downtowns and providing walkable communities.
> Well you talked about having ice cream and going to parks That's two of the things I mentioned, yes. I also mentioned museums and other amenities which are also "third places", as discussed in the article.
In my experience NYC has nothing in it that you can't find in dozens of other US cities for far cheaper.
Edited to remove worthless snark.
Happy to see I'm not alone and someone else is complaining about our sad parks, "What we call parks look like parking lots with some grass on them, perhaps a baseball diamond. That's not the kind of park that draws people in," Tayana Panova, a researcher who studies the built environment's effects on mental health, told me. "We need parks that have amenities and assets that make it desirable for people to go there."…
>It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at. Can't have those, the homeless might use them to avoid suffering for a few minutes and be visible, and that makes people angry.
Not sure where you live, but where I've lived, they form camps, do drugs in the open, scream at people, and vandalize their surroundings. They make a good environment hostile to everyone. That's what most people are angry about.