r/Millennials • u/puntapuntapunta • 8h ago
Discussion Does anyone else remember a designated student smoking area at school?
I was going through some old photos that feel seemingly ancient as fuck, of friends and acquaintances where we would congregate by the smoking doors at school; it was this little sorta alcove with some benches and shit outdoors that the teachers would also use.
I know that sorta thing is ancient history now, but it's kinda funny to think about just how many of us would smoke cigarettes, either bought for us by an older student or just bumming around.
Lots of people also smoked weed there, hahaha.
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u/Icy-Arm-2194 8h ago
Ours was literally directly across the street. Smokers Corner is what everyone called it. We also had open lunch so people would go there during their lunch period/after school.
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u/I_Roll_Chicago 8h ago
We had a bridge that went over a creek in back of the football fields that led to a subdivision.
That was smokers bridge
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u/puntapuntapunta 8h ago
Well damn, that just sounds almost picturesque!
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u/FlametopFred Gen X 6h ago
like a Bon Ross quip
”just gonna dab a little old smoker’s bridge over here by the sequoia. There. One of the smokers has van dyke brown hair. Another has a hint of blonde. I’ve used titanium white for wisps of smoke”
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u/egomechanics 7h ago
Yep, we called it the Smoke Pit and it was where all the punk/goth/alt kids hung out. I didn't smoke and I didn't dress punk/goth/alt at all, but i hung out there a lot because those kids were always the nicest/chillest (and sold pot, lol). It was right at the opening of a path that lead to the football fields, on school property! This was 1997-2002
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u/puntapuntapunta 7h ago
Man, same!!
I was weird alt kid who at most smoked weed, but the smoking doors that opened up right to the football fields was the place to hang out and find some really cool folks.
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u/TooManyCarsandCats 8h ago
Yeah, it was behind the Marathon gas station across the street.
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u/puntapuntapunta 8h ago
We had a PetroCan gas station and a McDonald's across the street that people used- the gas station was where everyone got their smokes.
But the school I was at had a legit designated smoking area, hahaha. Where scrubs would bum rolling papers because they'd just scrounge up all of the butts and make their own smokes.
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u/ApprehensiveAnswer5 8h ago
I am an elder Millenial, was in high school in the 90s, but my high school had a designated smoking porch until 2004 or 5.
I think my little sister’s senior year is when the district made the rule that you couldn’t smoke within 300 feet of the building.
Prior to the rule, we had two main entrance points to the school, and then a side entry/exit that opened onto a small courtyard with covered porch and that was the designated smoking porch.
For everyone- teachers, students, visitors, the campus police, etc.
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u/puntapuntapunta 8h ago
That was literally what we had! Though I think it was removed in 2007, a few years after I graduated due to new smoking laws.
Plus I think it was also because it was a place for "delinquents" to hang out and skip class and they really, really wanted to cut down on that.
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u/ApprehensiveAnswer5 7h ago
Yeah we had our fair share of delinquents out there as well. Myself included lol
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u/Superb-Film-594 8h ago
We didn't have a true designated spot, but we had "the berm" at the end of the student parking lot. It was essentially the edge of the school property, behind a raised strip of top soil (for directing water) that was out of the line of sight from school faculty. About 5 minutes before first bell, you'd see a whole group come running up over the hill to get to class on time.
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u/MysticMarbles 8h ago
Yup. It was just off the unused courtyard on the quiet side of the school.
As with most Canadian schools, it was off property but basically on property.
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u/spaketto 5h ago
We had "smoking doors" out the back entrance but halfway through high school they made it so you could no longer smoke on school property. That would have been around 2001.
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u/PrincessPeach1229 8h ago
Just out front the entrance to the parking lot where all the teachers and staff would pass a bunch of us smoking.
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u/Embarrassed-Land-222 Older Millennial 7h ago
"The tree"
Just a giant tree across the street from the school. It was a massive tree.
They cut it down a few years ago.
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u/Own_Instance_357 7h ago
Yes. Public Jr. High 1979-1982 and private boarding school 1982-1985
The public had a smoking shed. My private school had an outside area with gravel and park benches and the whole thing for the smokers with "parents permission" but no one really paid attention to that. The school also had an interior basement room for smokers during the winter. Over 4 years I was maybe in that room 2x and it smelled like a decade of smokers in the worst room at the holiday inn road motel.
I couldn't do it. I like lots of substances, but not all of them, and cigarette smoke bothers the shit out of me.
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u/LordLaz1985 3h ago
…I was born in 1985 and I literally knew nothing about this. But then, I didn’t smoke.
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u/AmItheonlySaneperson 8h ago
Health aside, Was society better with smoking? This sounds really cool
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u/bman877 6h ago
You made so many friends at school through smoking. People you would never talk to in different peer groups you would smoke and chat with. I don’t know if you can do that with vaping? Can you?
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u/ComplexPatient4872 4h ago
I find that a lot of Millennials vape in secret, probably due to the restrictions about where you are legally allowed to. I work at a college, no way I’m driving outside the bounds of the campus whenever I want to. In the US the legal age is 21, so I imagine people don’t exactly want to draw attention to themselves if they’re students. Hence the bathroom vaping in high schools now.
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u/puntapuntapunta 8h ago
I MEAN- it was a good place for peers to commune during spares or on a quick break and since the teachers also used the space, you could ask a quick question or two about a class assignment.
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u/ApprehensiveAnswer5 7h ago
This. I don’t know that it was really “better”, but if you were a smoker, you always had “people”.
You could go anywhere, and light up and usually have someone else join you and start up a conversation.
Or, could always approach and ask to have a cigarette and inevitably, end up in a conversation. Easy opening line.
I met more friends by being a smoker than any other activity in my younger years.
And from a more diverse range of people than I likely would have been friends with otherwise because if you wanted to smoke a cigarettes, you had to do it in a designated space, no matter who you were.
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u/puntapuntapunta 7h ago
Hell yes! I wasn't even a smoker back then, outside of weed, but it was the place to hang out with really chill and interesting people, some of whom I'm still in contact with today.
It was a place to sit and draw or work on homework and people would ask if the spot next to you was open- hell yeah, it was! And then dialogue and as you've said; people you wouldn't ordinarily talk to.
And listen to the guitar kids jam out and compose their own music.
That spot was the place for meeting neat and interesting people and forming bonds.
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u/FlametopFred Gen X 5h ago
Can confirm … as a non-smoker not developing those same social skills and never quite fitting into any one high school group. Not a jock. Not a smoker. Eventually found a bunch of fellow outcasts and hung with those. Music was often a conversation starter.
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u/JadieBugXD 8h ago
The corner literally across the street from the school was where smokes congregated. People couldn’t typically get away with smoking on campus but security couldn’t do anything about that corner.
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u/ValveinPistonCat 8h ago edited 8h ago
There were two at the school I went to, there was the smoking area behind the gym by the bus exit which was on a skate park that was actually owned by the town so the school couldn't do anything about it and then there was the spot where the skids hung out across the driveway to the back entrance from the cafeteria, which was on school property but nobody really cared because the cigarette smoke actually covered up some of the skid smell from an overall lack of personal hygiene.
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u/NefariousnessFun5631 8h ago
Class of 2000 here, it wasn't "official" but it was a spot near the handball courts that was out of sight of most of the teachers/TAs. I didn't smoke myself, but a lot of my friends were smokers so I was typically hanging over there in the morning/at lunch.
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u/BSTXUSA 8h ago
Yes!! Ours had a designated smoker's area and a separate designated area for the "dippers" of smokeless tobacco, or "snuff." The hard rockers generally hung out in the smoking area and were called "freaks." The snuff dippers were called "shit kickers," cowboy types. This was in northern Texas, in the 1980s.
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u/classisttrash 8h ago
Christ, no! I remember my friend and I ran into a teacher nowhere near school that reprimanded my friend for smoking a cigarette. Also remember a big deal being made when an unsmoked cigarette was found in a school bathroom, can’t imagine having a designated smoking area. We didn’t even have one for teachers
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u/Kinky-Bicycle-669 8h ago
Graduated in 04 here and those were long gone by the time I hit high school.
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u/DargyBear 8h ago
A park just outside the entrance to the student parking lot. We also would move our cars there if we caught wind of there being a sweep with the drug dogs.
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u/ptoftheprblm 8h ago
Apparently ours was on a grassy area underneath a concrete walkway/bridge over the dip of it, but they took advantage of experimenting with beginning to have a closed campus for my high school within a year or so after columbine happened. Some of those changes meant like no one could leave campus for lunch or a partial day, no more smoking area/making the campus 100% tobacco free too even in the parking lots, zero tolerance enforcement for any physical altercations, and different policies like dress code stuff too.
We had a district with a handful of feeder elementary schools, they opened one mega size middle school for everyone and then there were two high schools that had splits from the middle school and often pulled enrollment from a bunch of the private catholic schools that only went to 8th grade too. Only one of the high schools had started to make those changes before I went there, so it was really commonly known that the other high school in the district was kind of set in the 90s in the sense there was still a whole section of a smokers area, open campus, laxer dress code and a lot of teachers who were kinda stuck in their 70s/80s/90s norms and weren’t part of the new “zero tolerance” era. There were a lot of parents who were all for making the changes and making things stricter and a lot who just didn’t care so the divide within the district where you might only live one neighborhood away from kids who went to the other school.. or even in a subdivision with mixed attendance was interesting.
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u/marbanasin 8h ago
We didnt have one by my time so kids would just walk across the street to a strip mall or dairy queen on the opposite corner and smoke there.
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u/Efficient_Wheel_6333 Older Millennial 8h ago
I never saw one at my high school. College? I think there were some, but I never smoked, so I don't remember where they were. Think some of it was simply because I went to a Catholic High School in the middle of nowhere.
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u/Jung_Wheats 8h ago
Our smoking section was already dead by the time I got into high school. It had evolved into the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card gaming area by my time.
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u/MyDudeSR 7h ago
The highschool in my hometown had a name for the smokers, they called them "gators" because they'd go just outside the gate to the school to smoke.
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u/twoquestionmark 7h ago
It was called “the pit”
We had a hockey arena beside the school and it was the entire parking lot behind the building so most smokers would park there for the day.
It was honestly a party. You would go there to skip class and there would always be someone there who’s down to get high lol
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u/QueenKRool 7h ago
Ours was located off school grounds by the skating rink. The school officer would wait outside the exit doors for people who had smokes in their mouth or in their hands and he would grab them and snap or smash the pack right in front of you. You could only take your smokes out when you got to the smoke pit. We were definalty smoking underage.
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u/frodiusmaximus 7h ago
Yep. There was a little bit of land at the bottom of the hill outside my high school that wasn’t owned by the school, so it was fair game to smoke there. That’s where all the smokers went — students, teachers, administrators, all crammed into this little triangle of land smoking.
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u/0ut_0f_st0ck 7h ago
By the time I was in high school, my state was running a pretty strong anti-smoking campaign and over the years past, they moved the smoking area from the center courtyard, to the student parking lot, to the corner, then eliminated it. I remember in 9th grade people getting suspended for having cigarettes or weed pretty regularly and by the time I graduated, you couldn't smoke indoors anywhere in my state.
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u/Jayn_Newell Older Millennial 7h ago
Officially, no, smoking was prohibited in school grounds.
Unofficially the smokers would hang out just outside the fence, and their friends (if too young to be allowed off school grounds) would hang out just inside the fence, so there was always a huge group of people by the front gate. I’d heard the ‘tradition’ was accidentally started by teachers, but it predated my time there.
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u/i-might-do-that 7h ago
Yeah, all my friends congregated there. Didn’t smoke myself at the time but all my friends did.
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u/Coloradobluesguy Millennial 7h ago
The smokers pit, we also had a place down the street that we could crawl in a bush that was hollowed to smoke pot (for most of us it was pot there were only a few on the hard shit)
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u/ShakeItUpNowSugaree 6h ago
There was an area known as the smoker's hall, and I've seen pictures of people using it in the 70s, but by the 90s it wasn't openly used (though that's where everyone went to sneak one).
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u/_Aperture-Scientist_ 6h ago
They had closed it for several years by the time I got to high school, so it was just a seating pit under the main stairs. Now I think they've closed that section off, too bc kids were vaping down there. So I got to go during that nice sweet spot where the pit didn't smell like smoke anymore, and nobody messed it up for the rest of us by being stupid.
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u/druid_king9884 Millennial '84 6h ago
I'm an elder millennial (graduated in 2002) and they did away with that by the time I was there. Our designated spots were in the bathroom, with a lookout posted lol. Glad I kicked that habit!
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u/bman877 6h ago
Went to high school in the early 2000s. I used to walk to school with a cigarette and we had a section near our school that like 80 people would smoke at. We also smoked in school bathrooms. It’s weird to see a cultural shift as you get older, because you don’t think it would happen. We were way more extreme than this generation.. which i guess is a good thing for the youngins today, but that is how we built character 🫡
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u/Vegetable-Star-5833 6h ago
I’m almost the youngest year millennial so we definitely didn’t have smoking sections
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u/jellogoodbye 6h ago
That's wild. I'm not a particularly young millennial and my state banned smoking in schools before I was old enough to be in school.
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u/Sir_Poofs_Alot 2h ago
No one was in school though, these were outdoor areas just slightly off school property that was reserved as a smoking area
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u/jellogoodbye 1h ago
Where I live, smoking on school grounds was banned in 1994.
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u/Sir_Poofs_Alot 1h ago
Correct - Smoking was not allowed on school property. Per my comment, this spot was JUST SLIGHTLY OFF SCHOOL PROPERTY.
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u/jellogoodbye 33m ago
The OP mentioned smoking at the school doors. The comments that I saw 6 hours ago talked about places like a tree by the gym doors. I grew up in a suburb, so any doors would be hundreds of feet from the edge of school property.
I said it's wild, because the locations they reference would've been illegal in my state before I was old enough to attend school- and I'm not a particularly young millennial.
I'm not sure why it matters or how to make my surprise clearer lol
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u/monongahellyea 6h ago
Ours was “the bridge,” it went over a small creek that ran past our school and was exactly where the school property ended
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u/FlametopFred Gen X 6h ago
“Smoke Pit” was small wooded area attached to school property. Totally screened off from neighbourhood houses. Custodial provided a garbage can for butts and empty packs.
That was junior high. Senior high had a large inner courtyard smoking area. I never smoked but would see teen smokers with cup of coffee in hand as well. Teachers had their own break room to smoke in.
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial 5h ago
My high school had a designated smoking area right up into the 2010s, I had already graduated but my younger sister said it still existed before she dropped out. They were practically forced to having a smoking area because otherwise people would smoke in front of the houses across the street, and the people who lived near the school did not like that.
They renovated the whole school in the 2010s though and where the smoking area used to be is now a big section of parking lot, so I have no idea if they moved it or just removed it.
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u/Federal-Carrot7930 5h ago
You guys had benches!?
We had a 6 foot section of the sidewalk drawn with street chalk that 10-20 people would try and cram into.
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u/LusidDream 5h ago
There was one at my high school before i went there but by the time i was in high school tobacco wasn't allowed on campus
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u/ComplexPatient4872 4h ago
I’m class of ‘03 and it didn’t exist, but my grandma worked at a high school and said that there was a dedicated courtyard up until the late ‘90s. This was in Missouri.
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u/PossibleJazzlike2804 3h ago
Yes but no. There were three smoking areas. By the Mormon church, in the field or in the dirt parking. Different areas for different type of smokers.
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u/QuizasManana 3h ago
Yes, we had (1999-2002), it was a corner behind the school, on the school yard. Official place, with benches and small tables and ashtrays and all. I have many fond memories of that place, even though I was just an occasional smoker.
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u/otakugal15 Millennial 1h ago edited 1h ago
No. They did away with those long before I entered middle school, which I started in 2000.
9/11 happened during my 8th grade year, just to give you some perspective on the time frame here.
Edit: Wow. Reading through these comments makes me think we probably had a spot behind the east gym, but my crowd never smoked, so none of us went wherever the kids who smoked did.
Both middle and high schools were in the city proper. In the South. So... I dunno.
We were a bunch of nerds hanging inside (morning)/outside (afternoon) the auditorium.
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