The last days of a bizarre, glorious and outdated underground mall

The Tex-Mex restaurant had closed months ago. The camera store down the hall was moving online. Even the puppet shop - the one with the marionettes and googly-eyed Elmos in the window - was boarding up.

So two weeks before her own lease ran out, Elaine Demos could do little but pace inside her shoebox of a gift store and gaze out at what was left of the Crystal City Underground.

This suburban, nominally subterranean Northern Virginia shopping mall - a maze of kitschy mom-and-pop stores below office buildings and above a Metro station - had once seemed like something from the future. Weeks out from closing entirely, it had instead become a white-walled, climate-controlled purgatory.

“It used to be that everything you ever wanted was down here,” Demos said from behind the register. “Now, well, I just don’t know what to do about what’s left.”

Neither, it seems, did anyone else.

One longtime shopkeeper blamed it all on the pandemic and a steady loss of anchor tenants. Another pointed out the irony of Amazon - whose deliveries had helped make his brick-and-mortar retail business an endangered species - building its new Arlington headquarters down the street.

Demos, for her part, just said she was tired.

Across from her store, Garden Fantasy, a blue-tinted sign had gone up that invited passersby to “Join the Momentum” sweeping the neighborhood. JBG Smith, the property owner and developer whose name was on that banner, stopped renewing leases last year for the shops inside this mall outside D.C.

Everybody would need to be out by January at the latest. For what, exactly, the company has not said.

“It’s sad to see something that was wanted and enjoyed and needed here have to leave,” Demos said. “But you’ve got to understand that things evolve. As they say, one door closes -”

She stopped midsentence. A woman had come inside, eyeing a cherry blossom-themed T-shirt on one side of the store. It would be one less thing to pack up in a couple of weeks.

The mall of the future

Walking into the Underground - everyone just calls it the Underground - is like stepping into yesterday’s idea of tomorrow.

When developer Charles E. Smith cut the ribbon on the project in 1976, he deliberately chose to connect the shopping center (which is technically at street level) with the newly erected towers above it in Crystal City.

The buildings were filling up with federal agencies seeking cheap real estate and well-to-do professionals fleeing the crime and chaos of the District. Smith saw the opportunity to combine them all through a utopian experiment in self-contained living: You could leave your apartment, shop, eat, get your hair cut and arrive at the office - all without going outside.

“It was convenience at its finest,” said Jack Levonian, the mustachioed owner of Metro Camera, who opened his shop at the Underground right at the mall’s unveiling. “Any store that opened already had a built-in customer base.”

The most devoted regulars came down by elevator from their condos or cubicles, seeking out the independent, quirky businesses that Smith had favored for retail slots in a “turn-of-the-century village.” During big conventions, lanyard-clad convention attendees would come over through the tunnels to the faux cobblestone hallways of “Antique Alley.” In the spring and fall, eighth graders on field trips would crowd the Crystal Plaza food court, complete with its own carving station.

Each shop owner who stuck around still has their highlights from those days. For Levonian, it was the big Kodak photo shows, where the camera company would set up exhibits along the corridors. “This was like the center of the universe,” he said.

But times changed, and so did the Underground - just not in the way it needed to.

A federal process in the 2000s known as BRAC stripped thousands of military jobs - and customers - from the neighborhood. Then came the recession, and the loss of several key tenants: the Hallmark, the bookstore, and the Hair Cuttery where John McCain was a regular.

“Slowly but surely, one by one, people were falling off. Then it was a whole onslaught of people going out,” recalled Lorenzo Caltagirone, the owner of the Total Party costume and balloon store.

What remained was a time capsule from a time when Gerald Ford - or at least Bill Clinton - was in the White House. Clothing boutiques hawking “menswear” or “womenswear” and the outdated fashions those phrases evoked. The hallways, once dotted with antique leaded glass windows, now featured stock-image photos of people shopping.

As if to underscore that faded luster, Washingtonian magazine in 2017 called it “the architectural equivalent of ambient music.”

‘Just another memory’

The signs had all been piling up, but by the time most of the shopkeepers received the letter with the official news - no leases in the Underground would be renewed, and most of them would have to close up shop or relocate entirely by Oct. 31 - it was still a bit of a shock.

“It’s like my place, my home,” said Lucien Alban Odoulamy, an immigrant from Benin who for the last 28 years had been selling marionettes, plushies and ventriloquist dummies at the end of a long hallway. “But you take life the way it is.”

He appealed to them to let him stay. He asked Arlington County for help relocating. He wondered if he might convince them otherwise. But no luck. There would be no bulldozers coming to the Underground soon, or windows getting boarded up, but the storefronts would be empty.

“In light of the shifting retail landscape and National Landing’s continued evolution, it has become apparent that the Underground retail concept is no longer financially sustainable,” said a spokeswoman for JBG Smith, the property owner that merged with Charles E. Smith’s company in 2017.

Outside and above ground, the neighborhood had been turbocharged with new additions.

Amazon - once temporarily located in the offices right above the Underground, now a few blocks away - had started bringing in its well-paid tech workers, and the developer had opened a pair of fancy condos down the street. There were bakeries from Manhattan, and wine bars, and birria tacos. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Some Underground shop owners, like Caltagirone, thought they were being pushed out to make way for another big redevelopment. The company has not said what will come next.

“They’ll hollow it out. It’s easier for an investor to look at an empty space,” he said, but that came at a cost: “At the end of the day, these little small places aren’t going to exist, and then people have no place to even shop.”

The future, he admitted, may not be a mall and offices and apartments all inside one self-contained bubble. But he also said that commerce can’t shift entirely to the internet - no in-person interaction, no life on the street, no color. Online deliveries don’t always come on time. Neighborhoods need more than chains selling blowouts and vegan ice cream.

“I think we and this mall will be just another memory. I really do,” he said, preparing to move to greener pastures at L’Enfant Plaza in D.C. I think it’ll be people reminiscing with nostalgia about how things were.”

To Demos, though, it made sense. The food across the street was trendy and delicious. Most of the other shop owners had been underground for decades - just like her - and were already thinking about retiring anyway.

She would have wanted to move to another space in the neighborhood, maybe under the Amazon offices, if the retail spots there were smaller. But if the last few decades had made anything clear, it’s that a walled-off mall made it all too easy to think no one was there.

By the new year, anyway, that would be true.