On some level, we all want to be part of the dream of the Electric Maid: a place that's always open and always warm, a place populated by people we know, the juice bar equivalent of Cheers, where folks shout your name as you enter and your stool is perpetually reserved. When Robinson hit on the idea for the Maid, he was thinking that Takoma Park needed a "third place," an inclusive neighborhood gathering spot -- once the barber shop, the park, the soda fountain -- that has disappeared from chain-ridden suburbia. This was no leftist effort, he says. "I'm kind of a radical centrist. I believe in communitarianism."
DC residents are struggling to build a locus of community in
the Electric Maid. This article appears just days after dj was trying to point out to me the former location of a similar place,
the Beehive.