On Liminal Space and Shopping Centers: Dead Malls, Memory, and Changing Times

Alexandria, VA – The first time I heard the words “liminal space,” they were read by our then minister, The Rev. Dr. Kate R. Walker, Mount Vernon Unitarian Church. She had written them in her poem, “In Between”:

“In between, liminal, that space where we wait.
Between moments; events, results, action, no action.
To stand on the threshold, waiting for something to end,
And something new to arrive, a pause in the rumble of time…”

https://www.vashonislanduu.org/in-between-by-kate-walker/

Then recently I read an article by Lana Hall in the online literary magazine, Hazlitt, December 10, 2025, “The Dead Mall Society,” which talks about dead shopping malls. It tells about “an organization called Liminal Assembly which shuttles people through a series of decaying suburban shopping malls around the Greater Toronto Area, places that seem stuck in purgatory between eras, at once eerie and beseeching.”

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/dead-mall-society

Reading the article, I felt as if I were riding an escalator into musings on shopping centers. Per Bing, “If you trace the concept back in time, you’ll find that the idea of a centralized shopping and gathering space wasn’t new at all. Take ancient Rome’s Trajan’s Market, built around 110 AD. It had multiple levels of specialty shops, large halls, and open spaces for social interaction. While Romans weren’t exactly picking up lattes and fast fashion, the purpose was strikingly similar: commerce blended seamlessly with community.”

Around the corner from where I grew up in Brooklyn in the 50s there was a grocery store where items were taken from shelves behind the counter and put in paper sacks. The prices were tallied on the sacks in thick black pencil, and Mother checked the addition when I got home. The bakery was around the corner too, as was the drug store.

A block away there were individually owned shops, a kind of shopping center, that included a green grocer, a butcher store where chickens hung in the windows and meat was wrapped in butcher’s paper, and my favorite, Abie’s Pickle Store, where Abie reached into a wooden barrel and gave me a small half-sour pickle to eat on the way home. Half-sour pickles are still my favorite.

Other early shopping memories were not particularly happy. Shopping with my mom in Manhattan’s department stores, I remember frantically trying to remember what shoes she was wearing so I could find her. I was too little to see over the racks of clothing and was afraid I would lose her.

As a teenager I shopped in department stores with my friends. They seemed better able to just reach in and pick out interesting and affordable clothing from racks and piles.

I still never shop for fun.

When I opened my photography business, shopping centers took on a new importance in my life. We were hired to record the reopening of Union Station in Washington, D.C., in 1988-89. Union Station became more than a train station. It became a shopping center and an event venue. Potential clients came to my Fairlington condo to see our work. The want of professional space motivated me to move the business to rented space on King Street in January 1990.

The other big shopping center gig was documenting the reopening of Landmark Mall. Originally an outdoor mall that opened in August 1965, it was enclosed in 1990. Now those spaces are again being redeveloped.

Per an article by Rachel Treisman on NPR, August 28, 2025: The federal government is taking over D.C.’s Union Station. What does that mean? “As the Trump administration moves to take more control over the management of Washington, D.C., it is setting its sights on Union Station — a major transportation hub and national landmark that the Department of Transportation already owns.”

Closer to home, “The 52-acre Landmark Mall property located in Alexandria’s West End [is being redeveloped]. The mall was once a major regional retail shopping center, the first in the area to have three anchor stores. Over the years, Landmark Mall made several structural changes and renovations. However, with the meteoric rise of online shopping, many brick-and-mortar malls, including Landmark, are becoming a thing of the past (the last Landmark Mall store closed in 2020). In its place will be a walkable ‘urban village,’ anchored by a new Inova hospital complex and extensive mixed-use development…”

https://www.thegoodhartgroup.com/landmark-mall-redevelopment/

In my head I hear the lyrics written in 1963 by Bob Dylan: “The times they are a-changing.”

Mosaic Artist/Photographer Nina Tisara is founder of Living Legends of Alexandria.