You can now take a "field trip" to Toronto's dead malls
Liminal Assembly leads the right kind of tour for you if you’ve ever wanted to wander around an old building thinking about every person you’ve ever been.
Aryeh Bookbinder is the founder of Liminal Assembly, and he leads tours to “dead malls” in Toronto. They can be a kind of liminal space, which causes an emotional feeling that Bookbinder likes to think of as a specific “flavour of déjà vu.”
You might feel like you’ve been there before, even if you really haven’t, because specific scents, sounds, and aesthetics trigger a feeling of familiarity.
Liminal Assembly offers free walking tours and paid bus tours, which Bookbinder prefers to call “field trips” — particularly because he rents a yellow school bus to shuttle participants, usually about 50 people, to the malls. Field trips are about four hours long and cover four destinations.
Trips are usually escapes, which we love, especially as adults. But Bookbinder says he sees his tours as more of a return.
They can be a portal to the past and to your childhood — especially because he greets attendees on the bus wearing an old-school propeller hat and tells them he’s rewarding them with this trip, like a schoolteacher would.
The Woodbine Mall and Fantasy Fair, which was built in 1985, is one of the sites featured on the now sold-out upcoming January 27 tour. Bookbinder, who was born in Richmond Hill and grew up in Vaughan, has an intimate connection to the mall.
When he was around age six, he attended a camp that would take him to the Fantasy Fair. He could see the Ferris wheel and rides, and smell the chlorine from the fountain with its impossibly blue water.
Kids were laughing and screaming in excitement; there were people throwing darts at water balloons to win prizes and a huge jungle gym that also ran across part of the ceiling. He’d often get lost in there and panicked when he felt he couldn’t escape.
“It sounds scary, like a bad memory,” says Bookbinder. “But now it’s almost a dream. I wish getting lost in a playground was the worst of my problems.”
The mall isn’t very populated these days, and it has aged a lot. But most of what he remembers from his childhood is still there — making it the perfect place to experience a liminal space.
Bookbinder got the idea for the tours during the onset of the pandemic, when, like most of us, he was cooped up at home and scrolling online a lot.
He came across social media content focused on making people remember who they were, and how their childhoods felt; there were lots of memes about liminal spaces.
“I wondered if these places exist in real life,” says Bookbinder. “And maybe I can take it offline — make it even more powerful and more of a communal experience. So that’s what I did.”
Bookbinder started the tours five months ago while also working a full-time job as a conversational AI consultant. Currently, he leads them by himself.
“We play a game [on the tour] in the spirit of supporting the malls’ small businesses,” says Bookbinder. It’s a game of show and tell — people are encouraged to buy mementos to present to the rest of the group at the end of the tour, once they get back on the bus.
While the next tour is sold out, Bookbinder is looking to plan more, with something very special in mind for Family Day on February 19. He says he might just take us back to 2007.
Make sure you don’t miss out on the next tour by following @liminalassembly on Instagram.
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