by Alex Ullman
In my non-Magical life I run the student union at a college. For those of you who are not familiar with American college life, a student union (or student center or campus center) is a non-academic space on a college campus that evolved out of the need to give students a space to engage with their community outside of classes. Whether it was to meet with other students engaged in self-governance or to share a pint at the ever more rare campus pub, these spaces are designed to put students first and give them a place outside of the lecture hall and their residence room. In many ways I’m responsible for curating a Third Place.
What is a Third Place? If home is the first place and work (or school) is the second place, anywhere where you can go and just exist without these pressures and with other people is a Third Place. I was lucky to grow up in a major city and had access to a huge number of these places: there was a diner and arcade two blocks away, a book store I would spend hours in, a library, and so many others. I’m grateful to live in that same city and see my kid take full advantage of a playground to a similar end. To top this all off I have made a career out of providing this sort of opportunity to a population.
Story break!
I’m somewhere around twelve years old. Every day I get up and take the subway to middle school. This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to me but now that I’m a parent, talking to other parents who didn’t grow up in New York City, what I did every day back then is akin to marching through Bat Country with only the clothes on my back. For me it was literally a Tuesday (twenty percent of the time, anyway). After the bell rung I would often go home, but sometimes I would go with my friends to Neutral Ground.