In downtown San Francisco, there’s a multi-level shopping mall with an atrium and a skylight. If you stand in the dead center of the atrium and look up, it resembles an eye, looking down at you through a giant microscope.

This was taken during WonderCon 2009. Years later, I posted it for a February 2015 photo challenge on the theme “Symmetry.”

I was recently reminded of the view while reading author Annalee Newitz’ latest newsletter, Inside the Dying Malls of San Francisco. One of the malls they focused on, with current photos and commentary, was the San Francisco Centre. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it at first. It was the escalators around the central rotunda — the one I’m looking straight up through in this shot — that finally triggered the memory.

The mall isn’t completely dead, but it’s mostly empty now, hosting occasional local events. Newitz writes:

I remembered visiting SF Centre roughly twenty-five years ago, when I needed an outfit for my first grown-up job interviews. I rode the escalator up and up, gazing at floors thick with crowds, hoping to find the perfect suit at Nordstrom. The air had that vaguely nauseating mall smell, like cookies and perfume and new leather.

Now it is just abstract space divided up into further abstraction, light and shadow sandwiched meaninglessly together behind infinite golden railings.