Exploration of Liminality

In Percy Blysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias”, a traveler finds the cyclopean remains of a monument to the king Ozymandias buried in the sand. Inscribed on the statue’s pedestal are the words, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”, yet all that is left of the king are his amputated legs and the sneering expression of his face, half sunken in the ground. In the face of time, all that remains of kings are the foundations of their monuments and the inscriptions of their empires. The liminal encounter of the traveler was when, for a brief moment, they could see the imaginary cartography of a lost landscape. Where there was once an empire lies an expanse of sand, all that remains of our societal structures are architectural foundations and words. The liminal experience of space, one where we find ourselves in a state of transition from one realm to the next, is characterized by this very paradox: where the real and the unreal coexist.

Carpeted office back rooms with suspended ceilings, surprise attic spaces in horror movies, LED-illuminated airport terminals, and abandoned Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic rooms all share a state of liminality. These are the spaces where, as Rem Koolhaas wrote in his “Junkspace” manifesto, we experience the ghostly residues of modernity, ruins of an empire which has not yet fallen. In these spaces we are reduced to passengers, customers, and patients pertaining to no particular nation nor time.

In cyberspace, Dreamcore, Weirdcore, Backrooms, Uncanny, and Liminal are tags commonly found in the corners of the internet which are dedicated to the documentation of aesthetics. Observers are intrigued and disturbed by images such as an apparently exterior courtyard covered by a roof instead of the sky, a cubicle flooded with muddy black water, or a deserted shopping playground haunted by ghostly children. These photographs are edited to follow a muted color scheme or distorted with grainy effects and photographic anomalies. The liminal spaces of the internet incite the gaze of discomfort, where the viewer projects their anxieties onto a generic, corporate space wherein anything can happen. Video game companies have capitalized on this phenomenon, selling games where one can explore the “back rooms” of an office building where supernatural beings roam, lurking behind column grids and fire extinguishers.

Although liminal spaces online tend to have an otherworldly quality, liminal spaces are mundane, found in our urban city blocks, rural towns, and highways. Liminal landscapes include programmatically transient spaces such as airports, bus stations, or highways, copy-pasted corporate environments, decaying or overgrown spaces, and the interstitial residue space which line our cityscapes. As theorized by Marc Augé in his 1995 book, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity liminal space, “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity,” as it is a no man's land, between two existences. The thesis of the chapter entitled “From Places to Non-Places” is that supermodernity, through neoliberal city planning and globalization, has homogenized space and stripped communities of place-making culture, imposing a modular landscape, with replicas of replicas and simulacra. Focusing on the Special Economic Zone, the golf course, and the suburban model of development, Keller Easterling writes, in her book Extrastatecraft, that these spaces are agents of flexible market capitalism: where topography, climate, and cultural nuance are irrelevant against the infrastructures of power. The operating mode of our world, which Easterling describes as “Extrastatecraft” is viral and unbounded by national borders to achieve its agenda. “Extrastatecraft” is the fiber optic cable, the skyscraper, and the credit card number. In this wild form of global urbanism is where Marc Augé’s “non-place” is born. Augé’s anthropological space refers to places, “ formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers.” In these spaces, we are guided by signage which instructs us how to behave: no smoking, restrooms designated for either men and women, cautions about watching your step. According to Augé, the world of supermodernity is one where people are in a constant state of flux, navigating the frontiers of nowhere at the end of no time.

In Savannah, Georgia, a city with a characteristic historical identity, planners have attempted to hide liminal environments. Although the city of Savannah has worked hard to maintain its atmosphere saturated with ghost legends, civic traditions such as St.Patrick's day, and timely signifiers such as kerosene lanterns, liminality creeps in the corners of tourist, commercial, and transit spaces. This strip of city is designed for the commuter, as John Brinckerhoff Jackson identifies in his book, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, naming the zone a “Stranger’s Path”.

The Stranger’s Path is an assembly line: it ushers travelers into the blur of a neon city, feeds hungry bellies, distracts fatigued minds, satiates the desires of lonely hearts. The bus stop, airport, and parking lot are some of the first places visitors encounter, the portal to the real, where after crossing the threshold, one may enter the realm of city life, where people and places exist. The arrival terminal or bus station lobby denies the passage of time, freezing the passerby in a corridor of nothingness. While hotels and commercial establishments around Savannah’s historic district have attempted to mask their corporate non-placehood by adopting Southern vernacular elements such as fanned porches and even indoor blinds, the Oglethorpe bus station, underfunded and hidden away from the tourist’s gaze, has not sustained any illusions of place. Serving the commuter workforce of minorities and immigrants to the city of Savannah, the Chatham Area Transit bus station presents a case study in liminality and public transportation, alienating workers both spatially and psychologically.

The most memorable moment in the film Forrest Gump is the bus stop scene, where Forrest sits in Chippewa square and famously says, “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.” Countless tourists visit Chippewa Square in search of that bench, and to their misery, find nothing. Not only is there no bench to be found in Chippewa Square but there has also never been a bus stop there. Once in Savannah's history, squares were multifunctional common spaces but now historic and tourism committees steadily sanitize the squares, both white-washing them and sterilizing them of Savannah’s working class. In an effort to minimize the sight of bus-goers in the Historic District, planning committees in Savannah have been displacing stops further and further from the touristic spots since the dislocation of the Broughton Street Bus Station to the outskirts of Oglethorpe Road, at the delta of the Atlantic Coastal Highway.

According to Chatham County Transit Authority (CAT), public transportation in Savannah begins with the creation of “Savannah-Skidaway and Seaboard Railway Company” in 1869 which connected the greater Savannah Coastal area through intercity streetcars. The streetcars service surrounding towns of Thunderbolt, Isle of Hope, White Bluff, and Skidaway Island. The Savannah Transit Authority (STA) was created in 1961, providing subsidized bus transportation in the face of declining passenger rates due to the rise of the automobile. Throughout the 1980s, Savannah’s bus system scraped by as public funding and passengers declined even further. In the 1990s, bus transport in Savannah saved itself through cost regulation and reduction of operation costs. As bus traffic expanded, CAT undertook the relocation of Savannah’s main bus station from Broughton Street to Oglethorpe Road in 1995. The goals of the new station, according to CAT’s statements, was to provide a “climate-controlled passenger waiting area and other passen­ger amenities could reduce bus traffic along Broughton Street and enhance service delivery for the entire community.”

The result of this movement was the construction of the Joe Murray Rivers Jr. Intermodal Transit Center, completed in 2013. Partly a historical renovation of a midcentury Greyhound bus terminal and partly contemporary steel canopy construction, the CAT bus station was built to house fourteen buses with four separate bays for Greyhound buses. Today, the bus station operates sixteen Savannah routes and passengers from cross country and state buses.

Approaching the bus station, there is no threshold to ponder one's arrival. There is barely a sidewalk to cross the intersection, where the noise and speed of cars overwhelm the senses. A passenger named Keishawn sitting on the curb in front of the terminal gate wishes there was a place to eat. He says travelers are not able to walk too far to find a meal because they are scared to miss their bus. Inspecting the buildings surrounding the bus station, one will find mostly hotels, construction sites, and a Family Dollar a few blocks away. “We need small businesses,” says Judy Peecher, another passenger. Judy stands by the front doors of the lobby with her suitcases and complains that she needs a cup of coffee “to figure out what to do.” This sense of disorientation is not merely caused by an unfamiliar location but manufactured by the threatening urbanism that denies people the spaces they deserve. The cars, the lack of a crosswalk, the walls of inaccessible hotels makes the bus station and its surrounding neighborhood a non-place according to Augé. Judy describes her feeling of discomfort, when she was scorned for smoking in a nonsmoking area, “It was just harsh,” she sighs. The tense nature of the non place, breeds hostility between interactions, a performatic customer-employee identity, where both feel mistreated.

Through the main doors of the lobby, one finds the ticket booth and the interior waiting area. A generic terrazzo floored space with mass-produced perforated metal seats, drop acoustical ceiling, and large exposed vents for climate control. People form lines at the booths or lounge on the seats with their mountain of luggage beside them. Here, time barely passes under the constant illumination and controlled temperature. The air is stale and the atmosphere is dreary. Beyond the lobby lies the external bus waiting space. The floating steel cloak of the terminal lacerates the sky, but barely keeps in the leaks of rain from the previous night as seen in Fig. 1. The external bus waiting area is a long corridor of pure structure, cameras, monitors, white tube lights and electric wires (Fig. 2). At night, the bus station looks like it could be floating in space, as the city lights are nowhere to be seen beyond the fluorescent light of the canopy and the red blinkers of the bus.

A passenger who identified himself as “Traveling Man” points to the monitors that have been covered by a sign and exclaims, “I’m glad everyone’s coming together in this place but where is the money? The monitors don’t work!” (Fig, 3). He points to an elderly man in a wheelchair who sits in front of us, and laments, “People like him can’t wait inside the bus station. They don’t know where to catch the bus because the monitors don’t tell him where to go. COVID makes it unsafe for people like him.” When I ask about the neighborhood, Traveling Man looks at the construction cranes behind us and reflects about Yamacraw Village, “It’s not changing because of violence or drugs, it’s where the police go get their arrests. This is not something I’m saying, it’s something I know.” The bus station, at the intersection of gentrifying forces, according to author Joe Grengs, has abandoned its social goals. Where Congress once advocated for transit as a means for wealth redistribution, the dominance of the automobile economy has rendered these efforts ineffective. Now, rather than achieving equity, transit policy has aimed mostly to relieve congestion. With a transit system revolving around the interests of the suburban commuter and the highway developer, the needs of minority and working class people are neglected, depriving groups of political and social visibility. The spatial pattern concentrates poverty in the inner city and administers public transportation to dislocate workers where they are needed, servicing commercial districts in centralized locations. The construction of the bus station appears to be a mere corollary. An afterthought in the rings of Haussman, the rush hour of a 9-5 city, an exchange of people and products. In Savannah, a historically significant city with rising rent values and an evolving landscape, the flux of tourists, workers, and students sustain the city. For this reason, Savannah itself may be considered liminal, in state of transience (graduating students, migrant workers) and permanence (old money, historical preservation). Savannah is a city of solid-void.

While the bus station, the office space, and the big box store, are essential components in the choreography of a city, they are sickly nodes, decaying in front of us from lack of incentive and maintenance. Liminal space does not require elaborate façadism or cosmetic surgery. In our parting words, Judy told me, “The bus station doesn’t need to be pretty. It gets the job done even if it’s cold.” As our economy dissolves into virtual space, the residual liminal spaces in our cities are as the statue of Ozymandias in the sand: ruins of a dying empire.

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias," ( the Examiner, London, 1881).

2. Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace," (October 100, 2002), 175-190.

3. Marc Augé, “From Places to Non-Places,” in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,

(London;New York: Verso, 1995), 77.

4. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, (London; Brooklyn,

NY: Verso, 2014).

5. Augé, 101.

6. Kirby, Leiland/Caretaker, Everywhere at the End of Time, (History Always Favors the Winners, 2016), album.

7. John Brinckerhoff Jackson and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Stranger’s Path,” in Landscape in

Sight: Looking at America. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 21.

8. Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump, (United States: Paramount Pictures, 1994).

9. “History,” Chatham Area Transit (CAT), n.d, accessed January 29, 2022,

https://www.catchacat.org/about-cat/history/.

10. Ibid.,

11. Joe Grengs, “The Abandoned Social Goals of Public Transit in the Neoliberal City of the USA,” City 9, (2005):

52, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810500050161.

12. Grengs, 62.