By Mecca Durhal
Introduction / Project Description
Introduction Transcript Begins Here:
[time: 00:00:00]
Work-life balance, as a term some of us may be familiar with, is the concept of maintaining equilibrium between the amount of time and effort you expend working and living your life. You may have seen debates about what constitutes good work-life balance, usually in relation to people feeling as if they have no time for themselves, their friends, and their families outside of their career obligations. Adjacent to that idea is the sociological concept of “third spaces” — places you don’t live in or you don’t work at, but instead environments that act as neutral grounds and areas of stress relief and community for the people that visit them.
[time: 00:00:35]
Ann Arbor, as a college town, should hypothetically have a lot of third spaces. A lot of the college experience is figuring out what kinds of things you enjoy outside of classes, not to mention Downtown Ann Arbor is close to Central Campus. What do students do when they’re not at class? What do non-students that live in the area do? Where do they go for leisure, for community, and how easy is it to find these places to belong? What happens when third spaces are hard to come by? And, most importantly, are the third spaces that exist in Ann Arbor accessible — are they made with a diverse wealth of people in mind, or are the barriers of access in these places so profound that they isolate people, especially those with disabilities?
[time: 00:01:17]
Hi! My name is Mecca Durhal (pronouns they/them) and this is my final project for Networked Disability Studies. Over the next 25 minutes or so, I’ll be talking with you about these elusive third spaces of belonging — mostly in how they manifest physically in the Ann Arbor and University of Michigan areas, but also how the lack of access often forces people into isolation or to purely online communities (which, while great, can make life feel lonely in unique ways).
[time: 00:01:40]
For the sake of clarity, this podcast will be divided into three sections:
- The first section will talk about student-led creation of third spaces in the University of Michigan area, such as clubs and organizations, and how accessible that information is for students.
- The second section will be a comparison of third spaces now compared to U of M a couple decades ago, how the space has evolved and how it’s stayed the same — you’ll be hearing from my mother, a UM alum, for that.
- And finally, the third section will be an analysis of some of the third spaces that do exist here, what they do well, and what they could do better, and how easy it is to find and use them.
Introduction Transcript Ends Here.
Section One: Lack of Information
S1 Transcript Begins Here:
[time: 00:00:00]
So, I’ll be departing from the scripted, structured introduction of this podcast to a little bit more of a candid conversation about what’s going on on campus in the creation of third spaces. So, the primary way that students find out about clubs and organizations is through Festifall, which is a large event that happens at the beginning of fall semester that, at least on Central Campus, spans from the Diag to the Hill Auditorium. There’s also a smaller Festifall that happens on North Campus. I live on Central Campus, and my classes are on Central Campus, and the organizations that I go to are on Central Campus, so that is what I’ll focus on.
[time: 00:00:42]
Festifall is generally a really good way to find out about a lot of niche groups that you might not otherwise know about. And the energy during the event is always really high, people are really excited to talk to you about what they’ve got going on, and there are a lot of interesting people there as well. However, since Festifall is a lot of people’s primary way of finding out about these organizations, that means it receives a massive turnout every year. Festifall is also extremely hot — it’s at the beginning of September, the temperatures have not cooled down yet from August, it is miserable outside most of the time. It’s also very, very loud, just on account of how many people are there, but also because to reach over the noise, club members have to advertise very loudly what their deal is. In addition to all of these things, Festifall is often very confusingly organized. Every organization is grouped together sort of based on what their general category is, be it religion or LGBTQ or esports or international stuff. However, I have referenced the map multiple times when I’ve done rounds every year, and I still didn’t always know where certain clubs were supposed to be.
[time: 00:01:58]
The map was also fully online last year — last year being 2023 — which brought connectivity issues into the mix since Fall 2023 is also when the Internet was down for the campus for an extended period of time. The vendor list was also online in the form of an Excel sheet, as well as a few Canva slides that I managed to find. For those that can’t easily view images or text on the Internet, they fully had no direction. They were just wandering around.
[time: 00:02:25]
There’s a two-fold issue that gets created from all of the congestion and noise. One, it’s hostile to people that have sensory issues, like me, who are likely to be overwhelmed by the majority of the experience anyway, are constantly in close proximity to people they don’t know and are often bumping into each other. And two, because [of] the utter lack of space to move around for most of Festifall, it’s a wildly inaccessible event physically. Often, traffic doesn’t stop for wheelchair or crutch users. People continue on as if completely unaware of their surroundings outside of what’s being offered to them by clubs. That’s, of course, assuming that traffic moves at all because sometimes you are straight up not moving. This limits the time that people with physical disabilities or sensory sensitivities can spend at Festifall in general. Outside of the very start of festival and the last maybe two hours or so, during which the congestion is a lot less dense, it’s kind of a nightmare to get through. You don’t want to be there for a prolonged period of time. It sucks.
[time: 00:03:29]
And the issue with that is that a lot of clubs and organizations leave before the end of the event. Many set up and present their stuff and then dismantle all during peak attendance, leaving vacated tables. And sometimes these tables are taken up by other clubs or organizations, but sometimes they’re not. And so there’s just empty tables — empty real estate, effectively, for advertising, just in plain sight. If multiple clubs leave before their allotted time is over and their booths are inaccessible during peak hours because of traffic, then that completely segregates who is allowed to or is able to access the information that they’re trying to disseminate. It creates a barrier of knowledge.
[time: 00:04:16]
Now, Festifall isn’t the only way that you can find out about student organizations and clubs. Many people don’t go to Festifall at all, so there’s got to be some way for them to get that information, right? And there is. It is called Maize Pages. It an aggregate site of every student organization on campus. According to Student Life, there are over 1,600 organizations listed, so 1-6-0-0. I’ve scrolled through Maize Pages multiple times, and they’re not lying [laughs]. True to their word, there’s a ton of organizations on there across multiple subcategories. We’ll get into my problems with Maize Pages as a website in a little bit, but… I’m going to level with you.
[time: 00:04:57]
I’ve been getting emails from Student Life for years. We all have. I’ve skimmed a lot of them. There isn’t a lot of widespread advertisement of Maize Pages, of this basically treasure trove of organizations outside of specific events that are being held. The first time I found out about Maize Pages was by complete accident. So if this information exists, and the aggregate site to collect all of it exists, why doesn’t the university talk about it more?
[time: 00:05:28]
Student Life has a dedicated section on their website about finding and creating and joining community spaces. And it’s pretty in-depth, honestly? There are a lot of tabs separating communities based on what you might want to do, whether you want to have fun, whether you want internship help, you want to volunteer, you want to do activism. There are a lot of choices on that website. And the first time that I saw it was yesterday, doing research for this section of the podcast. They don’t talk about it. And that’s frustrating because the onus in finding community is very often placed on the individual. Again, this is assuming that they can find, use, comprehend, and effectively search the database for what they want to find instead of scrolling through hundreds of groups for hours at a time, which isn’t just impeded by technology prowess, by the way, but can also be hindered by the ways that certain people can or can’t utilize certain functions or parts of the internet.
[time: 00:06:26]
And that can feel like a personal failing when you don’t have the ability or you don’t have the energy to look through Maize Pages for 30 minutes trying to find a place to belong. And this gets into my issue with Maize Pages as a website, because you can filter the groups by subcategories, and there are about 10 or so, but that’s the only filtering option that you have. And in that way, it is pretty unoptimized, I would say. Um, for example, if you want to find a group that pertains to being Black and queer on campus, you will have to scroll through the entirety of the Culture section to find that group.
[time: 00:07:09]
Now, as a heads up, the group that I’m referring to is called Notably Black and Gay. Notice how that doesn’t begin with Black or queer [laughs]. That begins with notably. That is the group name, and that’s fine, you can name your group whatever you want. But it also means that if there are hundreds of groups underneath the Culture category, I’m going to have to scroll all the way to the latter half of the alphabet to find this group. And I don’t always have the energy to do that. Some people don’t have the physical ability to do that. And so as an aggregate site, it is frustrating to use.
[time 00:07:41]
And not only is it frustrating to use, it is easy to forget that it exists. I’d forgotten about Maize Pages personally in 2021 when we got back to in-person classes, and there weren’t many institutional structures in place to remind me of its existence. Many of the communities that I was seeking, places that included my various identities, felt completely inaccessible to me. Not to mention that at the time, some of them didn’t even exist, at least in any official capacity. Again, using Notably Black and Gay as an example, they were created in 2023, super recently. And even then, I discovered Notably Black and Gay from U of M’s Pride event that I happened to have time for, not Festifall, though they very well could have been there. Again, Festifall is a maze, and I didn’t want to be there for long because it was overstimulating. So even if they were there, I am fully unconfident in my ability to have found them.
[time: 00:08:39]
I’m reminded of our reading in class from Leah Lakshmi about Care Webs and the formation of different communities based around disabled identity. And even though some of these spaces fell apart, it’s still notable that they were made. And it’s also notable that the amount of energy that it took to make them was significant.
[time: 00:09:01]
There is information out there. It just isn’t as readily available as it should be. The effort of creating community is already extremely taxing for those with marginalized identities or niche interests, especially ones based around race and gender, sexuality, disability, and more. It is always on us as marginalized people to create our own community in the limited spaces and with the scraps that we’ve been given — and sometimes it really feels like scraps. Creating something as beautiful as the communities that Leah Lakshmi and her contemporaries made is extremely difficult, especially in an in-person space, like a university campus. But these spaces don’t exist without us. We will them into being, sometimes out of spite, sometimes out of love or duty or activism, and sometimes all of these things at once. So for a university to claim a certain level of dedication to community fostering and diversity, it shouldn’t feel like a wild goose chase to find a place to belong in the first place.
[time: 00:10:12]
I don’t really know the origin of this quote, but it’s one that I’ve heard basically my whole life and that I think about a lot. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t learn about something that you didn’t know exists, you can’t find something that you didn’t know exists. I think it is among the university’s many responsibilities to its students to help them foster community in as many ways as they can, as thoroughly as they can. And one of those ways is telling people frequently, “Hey, these are the pieces of information that we have gathered for you to make this as easy for you as possible because we want you to stay here. We want you to value your time in college. We want you to value this space. We want you to take advantage of it. We want you to find the people that you develop deep connections with.” But they don’t do that.
[time: 00:11:03.710]
And that’s sort of the thesis of this section: the principle of telling people things that they did not know about, doing it so they can live in a way that is authentically them, and also making this information as accessible as possible, presenting it in different ways in order to show the greatest amount of people that it exists. This could be in the form of physical media, telling them about the existence of Maize pages, the existence of the subcategories on the student life website. This could also be smaller congregations of people compared to Festifall. There are efforts that can be made to make community fostering as painless a process as possible, as it should be, because everyone is owed community.
S1 Transcript Ends Here.
Section Two: Compare and Contrast
S2 Transcript Begins Here:
[time: 00:00:00] – Editor
Welcome to Section 2 of the podcast! In this part, you’ll be listening to me and my mom talk about how attending U of M was like for her in the ’70s, what places were available, and how the Black students on campus fostered community in their own ways. A small content warning, there will be brief discussions of anti-blackness on campus. It’s important to me that I don’t cut those parts out because they contextualize a lot of her experiences as a student. Also, you learn from history by talking about it, and a lot of oppressive struggles are related to each other, so there you go.
[time: 00:00:33] – Editor
In the beginning of the conversation, I asked her about places she enjoyed going to on campus, which included Bivouac, a restaurant called Krazy Jim’s, which still exists, by the way, and Nectarine Ballroom, which is the full name for Necto. So here’s a snippet of that conversation, along with some of my follow-up questions.
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[time: 00:00:53] – Mecca
Um, other than like Bivouac or Krazy Jim’s, um, or I guess Necto, were there any other places that like, you or like any of your sorors particularly enjoyed going to, or was the pool of places that you went kind of like, limited?
[time: 00:01:13] – Andrea Frazier
The pool of places was limited. Pretty much if we hung out, we hung out in people’s apartment, y’know. Or there would be a group of guys or a group, say, four or five or six people. Probably not six. Probably more like four. There might have been like four people who were in a house or you know, some of the houses on campus that people live now. But back then, some of those houses were not apartmentized. I know that’s not a word, but—
[time: 00:01:48] – Mecca
Apartmentized makes sense to me.
[time: 00:01:50] – Andrea
Yeah. So, it was a three-bedroom house or a four-bedroom house, but they weren’t separate bedrooms. It was literally a house with four bedrooms.
[time: 00:01:59] – Mecca
Right.
[time: 00:01:59] – Andrea
So, yeah, people in the Black community would have our social gatherings and things like that in places like that, just because there was, in the ’80s, there was a lot of racial tension on campus. Yeah, the Black students on campus really stuck together because we were all we had.
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[time: 00:02:19] – Editor
As we transitioned in our conversation from how it was like to be a Black student at U of M at the time, into what barriers still exist that prevent students from engaging in social spaces, I started thinking about financial barriers that exist between these places of belonging on campus and the students that want to use them. This leads to a conversation about creating spaces out of necessity, as well as the death of third spaces when people assume that they’re not wanted. This is the last time you’ll hear from editing Mecca for this section, so I hope this part of the conversation and its conclusion is stimulating for you without my interruptions. Have fun!
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[time: 00:02:53] – Mecca
Yeah, that’s sort of, I think, what I’m trying to get at more so like, the variety of things to do. Because like, I have nothing against cafés. I love cafés. I go to Argus pretty frequently. But there’s not a lot of places in Ann Arbor that I would say you can engage in without spending a certain amount of money, which I think inherently makes them inaccessible to a lot of categories of student because not everybody has a lot of money. Bars and restaurants are the obvious example of that. Like, you need to pay money to get in there. In cafés, too. But it’s like, there are… uh, y’know, if you want to enjoy music, you’ve got to pay to enjoy music a lot of the time.
[Time: 00:03:36] – Mecca
Now, mind you, today, I walked past a house that just had free music, which was very fun. That was very nice. There was a dude playing the sax. But there’s a financial barrier that comes into what third spaces you can enjoy in Ann Arbor that sometimes is very discouraging.
[time: 00:03:54] – Andrea
I think for us, I think in the ’80s… One, we didn’t have a lot of, this is before the internet, this is before social media, all of it. We had to make our own fun. We grew up having to make our own fun. That’s where the hanging out [at] somebody’s house came from. You made your own fun. You made a party with people that you liked, that you wanted to be around. You’d go to the store, somebody’s big brother, cousin or somebody.
[time: 00:04:27] – Both Speakers
[laughter 00:04:27]
[time: 00:04:28] – Andrea
We played the music we wanted to hear, and, yeah. We just created our own thing. That’s what I meant by the sense of community because we knew we were all we had. We weren’t necessarily welcome in majority spaces. We replicated the spaces that we wanted to be in in our own way. That’s what I mean.
[time: 00:04:57] – Mecca
I guess I also I wanted to speak to that on the… I guess this is technically getting back to the apartmentization? Of the housing situation [in] Ann Arbor. It’s so hard to congregate. Ironically, despite them building more places for people to live, there’s less places to be, if that makes sense. We talked about this a little bit, how the original Pinball Pete’s location is potentially shuttering because of the high rise that they’re building directly next to it or on top of it or whatever. And so it feels like as the university just ends up expanding. It also is closing in on itself a little bit. Does that make sense?
[time: 00:05:51] – Andrea
Yes. That’s the difference between what I would call, what I said about, Ann Arbor being a sleepy town that was locally owned. Everything was like a mom and pop, eclectic kind of place. Going from that and moving into the more what I’ll call corporate spaces. Well, because you worked for Barnes & Noble, all of the independently owned college bookstores were bought by Barnes & Noble. So Barnes & Noble now manages however many university bookstores across country. So there’s no real need for an Ulrich’s anymore. And so after however many 50, 60 years, Mr. Ulrich is tired.
[time: 00:06:40] – Both Speakers
[laughter]
[time: 00:06:42] – Mecca
Yeah.
[time: 00:06:43] – Andrea
But 50 years ago, 60 years ago, you could open a college bookstore and take care of a family of four, buy a house, have a car. Yeah. So moving into that corporate environment, those local places go away. Then what you’re left with is these swanky new high rises that have rooftop pools and all these kinds of things.
[time: 00:07:13] – Mecca
[crosstalk 00:07:13] Like, oh my goodness, we have our own absolutely decked out gym. Yippee! And The rent is $35 million.
[time: 00:07:22] – Andrea
Yeah, because the people that value places like a pinball piece or an like, more like Bookstore are my generation and older and are dying out. So there’s no—
[time: 00:07:37] – Mecca
Like in the corporate world or just in general?
[time: 00:07:39] – Andrea
Just in general. So over time, people were like, we no longer really need these things? So let’s just get rid of them.
[time: 00:07:50] – Mecca
I see.
[time: 00:07:51] – Andrea
You know, you have apps on your phone where you can play every game known to man. Why do you need to drive to somebody’s house so you all can sit around a card table and play bid whist or play spades. You can play spades on your phone and you can even… Everybody can be in their own house and we can play a virtual game [laughs] of spades or D&D or whatever. That whole community connection.
[time: 00:08:15] – Mecca
[crosstalk 00:08:16] I think that’s valuable. I think that’s valuable, but like, because online spaces are so important, I mean, in general. Hi, I’m your child, you’ve watched me grow up on the internet. It’s allowed me to make, y’know, these really deep connections that are very important to me. But I think it feels like an all or nothing philosophy, almost, where it’s like, sure, a lot of my important relationships are online, but I’d also like important relationships that I can foster in “real life”, quote unquote. But it feels like because the assumption is nobody wants these spaces, but people actually do, that they just get rid of them. That sucks.
[time: 00:08:59] – Andrea
Yes it does. Maybe the demographic of the university has changed over time where those things aren’t as valuable as they used to be. And the issue is it’s not like “just get rid of them”. It’s that [it] costs a certain amount of money to be able to operate an establishment. So, if you don’t have the customer base to operate the establishment, then you go out of business. Or if big corporate wants to come in and we want this land because we need more student housing, which from the university standpoint is more valuable because they’re getting tuition from every student. So, we need to have somewhere for these people to live or they won’t come here. Not only will they not come here to go to school, they won’t come here and even go to the arcade if they’re interested in it. So at the end of the day, we want the student — would be great if we could have the student and they have the arcade as an option of something a third space to go to. But at the end of the day, for the university, they want the student and they want the tuition. So that’s what I mean.
[time: 00:10:08] – Mecca
Yeah.
[time: 00:10:08] – Andrea
Over time, the things in places that become important to you as a child or a young adult, as society continues to progress, a lot of those things go away because a lot of times it’s the cost to maintain it. So, it’s all a cycle of just building and destroying… but to what end, I don’t know. So, yeah.
[time: 00:10:37] – Mecca
Yeah.
[time: 00:10:38] – Andrea
But sometimes you have to create those things. That’s how it starts. It’s community-based, it’s community-driven. Yeah. So… and yes, it’s work. And so, yes, it’s nice that those places already exist and you can just go there, but you always have to keep in mind that there was somebody who had the idea that put it all together. And so that gets back to the community piece. It’s always going to be one, two, a small group of people who say, “This is lacking or this is missing, or I wish that X existed and make it.”
[time: 00:11:23] – Mecca
Mhm.
S2 Transcript Ends Here.
Section Three: The Places That Do Exist!
S3 Transcript Begins Here:
[time: 00:00:00]
Hello, and welcome to the final section of the podcast, Section 3. Aren’t you excited? Now that we spent some time talking about the barriers to creating community in the U of M area, as well as gotten some insight from my mom about the spaces community was fostered in during her time at U of M within the Black community, I’d like to bring us back to the present. Outside of online interaction, a lot of my representational community spaces coincide with my personal interests, the biggest among them being gaming in all of its forms. To get away from some of the work required in creating all new spaces, I wanted to give some examples of niche spaces that already exist outside of bars or cafés or restaurants, ones that others might enjoy just as much as I do. After all, there are a lot of disabled, Black, and queer gamers, if you know where to look.
[time: 00:00:47]
But how accessible are these niche third spaces, really? I took a couple trips around Ann Arbor to find out, selecting three locations that I personally find a lot of joy in. Using Timarie’s rubrics for physical and sensory access from their write-up on Ann Arbor’s social hubs, I’ll be giving a quick accessibility audit to each of these locations. This section will have a written portion with all the data, along with Timarie’s explanation of what the ratings mean, because I don’t want to take too much time explaining it myself. So feel free to reference that as I talk.
S3 Transcript Pauses, Quote Begins Here:
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Rubric used to determine wheelchair/mobility impairment accessibility score
When analyzing spaces to see how accessible they were for people with mobility disabilities, there were a few different aspects to think about. It’s not as simple as the bathroom or entrance being accessible. If a place is genuinely accessible, there should be no need to wave down staff members for assistance or guidance to the bathroom/entrances. While still accessible, there’s a certain degree of social accessibility that’s not granted, because people with mobility disabilities have to do extra work in order to get their accommodation. This is what, on the rubrik, I refer to as nodding. If nodding is required to get through the entrance comfortably, navigate a (potentially cluttered) hallway, or access the bathroom a point is deducted. From there on, points are deducted for specific reasons in each category. For entrances, another point is deducted if party separation is required. If the entrance is not accessible, 0 points are given. For the walkways, if they are cluttered and it appears difficult to navigate, another point is deducted. Again, if the building itself is not accessible, 0 points are given. For the bathroom, if it is a “storage closet” bathroom (many of the wheelchair “accessible” bathrooms are the employee bathrooms) another point is deducted. If there is no handicapped bathroom that is accessible, 0 points are given. For example, at Circ Bar, the entrance is wheelchair accessible with an elevator, but nodding and party separation is required. […] This data was found by walking through the establishments and taking note of how the interior was shaped and structured. This score will be referred to as the WMIAS score.
—— Timarie, Sensory Environments in Ann Arbor’s Social Hubs
Method used to determine sensory stimulation levels
When determining sensory stimulation levels six different factors were taken into consideration: lighting, crowd levels, temperature, noise levels, free space, and how convenient it was to access the outdoors. This was all dependent on busy weekend times. Nobody knows a venus atmosphere better than their managers and employees, so I conducted a survey. I asked a question about each six of the categories. I started with lighting, asking how harsh it was (neutral lighting; minimal party lights / harsh lighting; party lights + dark; and strobe lights + party lights + dark). If it’s the highest level of lighting that’s listed, it’s the highest on the scale. This is the same way it works for each category.
Lighting?
- 3 – strobe lights + party lights + dark
- 2 – party lights + dark
- 1 – minimal party lights / harsh lighting
- 0 – neutral lighting
Crowd levels on weekends?
- 3 – completely packed, difficult to move around
- 2 – quite crowded, minimal room to move around
- 1 – busy, but room to move around comfortably
- 0 – not very crowded
Temperature?
- 3 – hot– due to movement and bodies, it is a very warm environment
- 2 – warm– warmer side
- 1 – mild– you may get warm, depends on how much movement
- 0 – temperature isn’t a concerning factor– average, temperate
Volume?
- 3 – very loud, may need earplugs (large speakers, live music)
- 2 – quiet loud (karaoke, large speakers)
- 1 – minimal noise (juke box)
- 0 – little to no noise
Quick access to the outside?
—— Timarie, Sensory Environments in Ann Arbor’s Social Hub
- 3 – no access to outside unless you leave
- 2 – access to outdoors but is not easily accessible
- 1 – easy access to outdoors/ partly outdoors
- 0 – outdoors only
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Quote Ends, S3 Transcript Continues Here:
[time: 00:01:16]
First off, we have Pinball Pete’s, a beloved arcade started during the arcade boom of the ’70s. It’s currently looking for a new location downtown since it’ll likely be removed due to the construction of a new high rise. But for now, you can find it on South U next to the USPS post office.
[time: 00:01:32]
Here are some good things about it:
- It has a wide variety of games. Most of them are old, with a few newer cabinets for students to check out. I’m partial to the DDR, or Dance Dance Revolution, machines in the back of the room.
- It’s the only location of the ones that I’ve picked that is directly on Central Campus. So in that sense, it’s very easy to get to. It’s only a 15 minute walk or so from the Central Campus transit center.
- It stays open until midnight most nights, and on Friday and Saturday, it’s open until 2:00 AM. So it’s perfect for those that are night owls or want to unwind after doing their school work.
[time: 00:02:05]
Despite these cool things, however, it has one glaring issue. You can only enter Pinball Pete’s via stairs. This, according to Timarie’s WMIAS scale, gives it zeros across the board. After all, if you can’t even physically enter the building, then there’s no way the bathroom within it is accessible. I’ve also never been inside the bathroom, to be fair, but this is an assumption that me and you can make together. In other words, it completely fails on the physical accessibility side of things. It’s also a hot and loud place on account of all the game cabinets and people. During its peak hours, it can get fairly crowded and hard to navigate, which is an issue made worse by its dim lighting. Essentially, if you can enter, it’ll likely take some extra tools like headphones or a portable fan, which I tend to take with me whenever I go inside, as well as some assistance from friends for you to have a fully enjoyable experience. So, that kinda sucks.
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[time: 00:03:02]
Luckily for us, Pinball Pete’s is not the only arcade that exists in Ann Arbor. Second on the list is Best in Games, or BIG, for short. Owned by the founders of Zap Zone and located across the street from Cinemark, Ann Arbor — which is technically in Ypsilanti — BIG is a giant three-story gaming center with an expansive arcade, axe throwing, go-karting, laser tag, karaoke, and more.
[time: 00:03:26]
Once again, let’s go through some of the good things about it:
- It has a much wider variety of games than Pinball Pete’s, including many more modern cabinets. So if you’re less of a fan of Pac-Man or Galaga, and more of a fan of claw games, and modern DDR, and rhythm games, those might be more up your alley like they are mine.
- Like the Shapiro Library (or the UGLI), it gets quieter the further up you go. So if you ever need to take a break from the noise, the third floor is a good place to be. The third floor is also where they keep the go-karts, but they’re surprisingly quiet, so that point still holds.
- Aside from the door, which requires some assistance, giving it a two on the entrances part of the WMIAS scale, the arcade is actually very accessible, with an elevator to take you between each floor and wheelchair accessible bathrooms on each one.
[time: 00:04:18]
Now, let’s get into some downsides.
- BIG has no nearby bus stop. The closest one is the bus stop for Cinemark, and even then, the bus ride itself takes around 45 minutes to an hour, depending on where you are, and you still have to walk 12 minutes from the stop to BIG. The crosswalk itself is actually very far from the physical building. Not all bus stops can be directly in front of the place you want to be. That’s totally fine. But if you’re not able to or don’t want to jaywalk between parking lots and cross a minor slope to cut down on time, then it’s a bit tedious.
- The ease of navigating walkways depends on the floor. In general, the first floor is going to be the hardest to move through on account of the crowd, though it’s not impossible. I rated a one at peak hours and maybe a two as it clears up a little. And again, it gets easier as you go higher, with the third floor being the easiest to navigate with the widest amount of unoccupied space.
- The arcade cabinets are also, as most seem to be, designed primarily for able-bodied people. This is less an issue with BIG itself and more with arcade gaming as a whole, though. So your mileage may vary with how many games you’re actually able to play on the arcade level.
- Similar to Pinball Pete’s, BIG can be very loud and hot depending on where you are, especially the first floor. In fact, BIG to me feels hotter than Pinball Pete’s on account of the fact that they have way more game machines and thus way more people. I’d recommend dressing lightly, leaving your coat on the rack near the door and having earplugs on hand to mitigate the noise.
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[time: 00:05:50]
Finally, in a departure from the flashing lights of BIG and Pinball Pete’s, we have The Sylvan Factory, which is a small business centered around tabletop gaming on Ann Arbor’s West Side. You can stock up on Dungeons & Dragons books, get some new Pokémon cards, and sit down to play Magic: The Gathering if you’re so inclined. They pride themselves on being inclusive, and the staff are all very kind.
[time: 00:06:10]
One more time, let’s go into the good stuff before we transition into the bad stuff:
- The Sylvan Factory has two main sections, the merchandise area and the play area. Both are well-lit and very spacious, with lots of room to move around. The entire store is accessible with public handicapped accessible bathrooms, and the play area has a nice amount of space in between the play tables so you don’t get stuck.
- It’s the only place on the list with free events. In fact, there are multiple free events that happen weekly. There are special tournaments that happen on specific days as well as paid events. But if you just want to learn how to play a new card game, test someone’s prototype, and join the community before you commit, it’s great for that.
- You can reserve spots in their private room area if there’s something you’d like to do with friends in a place that isn’t your house, which I love as someone with a small apartment and a recently-sized D&D group. They’re very cheap, between $10 per person for 3 hours and $12 per person for four hours. Generally, their own events only last 3 to 4 hours, so that’s why there’s a time limit on that. But it’s very convenient, and the rooms are nicely sized and very comfortable to stay in. They’re about as temperate as the normal store itself is.
[time: 00:07:20]
And one more time, let’s get into the downsides:
- Like BIG, the door for The Sylvan Factory is push-pull handle only, so you might need assistance to open it. This is because The Sylvan Factory is located in a very standardized open air mall, so they have not gotten a chance to change out the doors, but that is still an issue.
- To get to The Sylvan Factory, you have to cross a busy street and navigate a parking lot. On foot, this takes about 12 minutes due to the size of the open air mall it’s located in. The ground is also a bit gravely, which might pose an issue to those with certain types of walkers. Once the ground transitions to a covered walkway, though, it should be smooth sailing from there.
- You can only really get to The Sylvan Factory by car or bus. It’s a much shorter trip than it is to get to BIG, mind you. It takes about 30 minutes on The Ride and only 9 if you’re able to drive yourself, but it’s not exactly local to the University, which again is an issue that BIG shares.
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[time: 00:08:17]
So, what was the point in me curating this little list? Well, for one thing, Timarie’s access audits of nightclubs and restaurants in Ann Arbor was really formative in helping me decide what I wanted to do with this project. I kept thinking to myself, “Not everyone is interested in going to nightclubs. Not everyone has the money to go to restaurants. I’m not always interested in those spaces, so why not provide some more options for places to go and review them in a similar way?” After all, as Timarie says at the end of their project, their investigation is “just a starting point for further accessibility in online sensory descriptors”, with the ultimate goal of creating a more accessible Ann Arbor. That really resonated with me. And as much as I talked about the University’s duty to share knowledge with people in the first section of the podcast, I figured I could put that idea into practice by telling you about some specific places that I think fill a slightly different social need.
[time: 00:09:08]
All of these places are lovely third spaces that one can use to foster community and social interaction and investigate new interests. But they, like many other places in Ann Arbor, aren’t always designed with everyone’s differing access needs in mind. Now, it isn’t possible to cater to every person’s individual access needs. We’ve discussed this. But there is an assumption that because disabled people are disabled, that they would have no interest in certain types of activities, or that it would be too hard to accommodate and provide access to them even if they did. And so many don’t even try. It’s demonstrably false. Disabled people want to enrich their lives with new, fun, loud experiences as much as everyone else, [and] surround themselves with like-minded friends and like-minded communities. Disabled people and people seeking community deserve to have the choice in whether they get to engage, not have it made for them. Whether the space was bought in the ’80s or in 2022, whether it’s owned by a corporation or just a few impassioned individuals, there are changes that each location can make to help provide these exciting and enriching experiences to everybody, not just who they think their default customer base is.
[time: 00:10:22]
And that brings me to the end of my podcast! We covered a lot of topics, I know, but I hope that over the course of our time together, I’ve given you some perspective on the various barriers that prevent the full usability of spaces within the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor areas, as well as some spots in Ann Arbor that are doing the never-ending work of incorporating access into their foundations and principles of operation. I also hope that you’ve come to appreciate the effort, creativity, and love that goes into creating third spaces, how that process has evolved over time, and how we owe it to ourselves and to others to maintain and improve the places where our lives flourish the most.
S3 Transcript Ends Here.
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Works Cited:
Pinball Pete’s, https://www.pinballpetes.org/.
Best In Games, https://bestingames.com/.
The Sylvan Factory, https://sylvanfactory.com/.
Timarie. “Sensory Environments in Ann Arbor’s Social Hubs: A Guide to Sensory Environments and Accessibility Scores of Various Social Hubs in Ann Arbor.” Imagining Access. https://imagining-access.net/2023/12/18/analyzing-wheelchair-mobility-impairment-accessibility-and-sensory-environments-in-ann-arbors-social-hubs/.
Thank you for listening and reading!
