640 - Crystal City Shops
Today I explored an abandoned underground mall.
The crazy thing is that I live right down the street from it. The mall, known as the Crystal City Shops, originally opened in 1976. The concept was to create a turn of the century shopping mall that existed entirely underground.
It started with over 40 stores, spread across 12,000 square feet. And by 1990, over a hundred retailers existed in the space that was slowly becoming an architecture anomaly. The whole underground mall was like a retail heaven from the future.
But when the 2000s hit, things began to tank. The design began to feel aged, and the boom of the internet led to an increase in online shopping. Combine that with decreased foot traffic from major changes in the above-ground landscape of the area, and the shops began to topple one by one.
By 2024, almost all the stores had been abandoned, and now the Crystal City Shops exist merely as a relic of the past. However, the tunnels are still open to commuters because they connect a couple big office buildings in the area, and provide easy access to the DC Metro.
That also means that we have pretty much unrestricted access to the area for photos. And with the advent of Backrooms (the new movie about liminal spaces,) the place felt oddly applicable to the times.
Be warned that I almost didn’t include this as an official adventure, so take all my images with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t say any of them are absolutely groundbreaking, but the whole thing was such an interesting experiment in strange underground lighting I couldn’t resist posting it.
Let’s start from the top.
When you first enter the tunnels near Movement Crystal City (our local climbing gym,) this is the entrance you see:
It’s the last look at the outside world before you disappear into the fluorescent abyss. From there, you’re led into an infinity tunnel that eventually leads you to the mall spaces:
To capture this feeling, I edited the hall to make it seem like it goes on forever. I did this by copy/pasting the hall into the smaller part and blending the two. It was my first time trying a composite like this, but I’d say it came out pretty well.
If you keep following the hall, eventually you land on this place:
And this is where things start to get strange. What is the point of this room? Why the flowers? Why the lighted pillars? There’s literally nothing else in the room.
Once you pass through, it eventually leads to another long hall that leads you to this:
Also known as the Arcade, this decorative hallway is full of chained up shops that are now all completely empty. The lights flicker above, and create this very eerie atmosphere of post-modern consumerism.
God I love using those words.
As the route keeps going, it opens up to a few more rooms that rise in size:
And then… it suddenly ends. You exit the door and you’re right back on a busy street again. It makes you wonder what else is hidden right in plain sight.
