The Woodside Tavern: A lasting ‘third place’
Sometimes I tell people that I reside in a house across from a bar, and I joke that the bar is the living room.
Our house has a living room, but it does not provide the same living as living in the Woodside Tavern. We eat lunch or dinner there when it’s quiet and the lowering sun casts a warm light inside. On weekday nights we can play pool, and if Hari joins in then he always wins against the boys. We can see music there on weekend nights, and it’s music that belongs to us. Some musicians in the neighbourhood call it “home base.” It’s this feeling of belonging that classifies the tavern as one of those final, persevering “third places.” One is lucky to find comfort in the “first place,” which is home, and especially fortunate to feel content in the “second place,” which is work. To even have third place at all is a lottery win.
These classifications come from American sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place. He writes that the third place hosts “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” He necessitated that it is inviting, informal, convenient, and unpretentious; it has frequent regulars, conversation, and laughter. Without a third place, community is just a concept — out of reach from people caught in the clockwork between home and work. In this absence of belonging there remains a gaping hole, often filled with screentime: mindless scrolling, parasocial online interactions, streams of fictional third spaces like Cheers and Central Perk, now themselves an aging vintage.
The Woodside Tavern is no simulation nor sitcom; it’s real. Places like the tavern render community tangible. The people of Woodside drink the same bottles within the same Canadiana-lined walls, and so the community of Woodside exists.
Like many great good things, the third place is facing threats in the 21st century. Increasing commercial rents mean affordable, casual establishments struggle to stay afloat. The café where one must buy, consume, then leave cannot be a third place in any meaningful sense. The tavern is fighting related threats of its own, too. It is surrounded by property it doesn’t own in a neighbourhood that is changing. Lately, the door is plastered with warning signs:
WE DON’T OWN THE
PARKING ON THE SIDES.
THE GUY WHO DOES,
LOVES TICKETS!
USE ARTHUR, STEPHEN,
& THE SIDESTREETS.
DON’T LET THE
BULLIES TAKE YOUR
HARD-EARNED MONEY!
We used to call the Woodside Tavern the cube because of how it stands alone in that parking lot. Although resolute, the nickname didn’t stick because the Woodside is pleasant and the tavern is warm and welcoming.
The tavern is these things — but it also stands resolute, like its owners. “I just can’t be bothered by someone who has nothing else better to do,” Junu told us one night while shining glasses behind the bar. “He’ll spend his time worrying about the parking, and we’ll still be here,” she shrugged.
Then she looked at us and laughed: “And you’ll still be here.”