Alban Odoulamy has been selling puppets out of his shop in the Crystal City Underground for 28 years. Opening as "La Marionette" in April 1996, that shop now Puppet Heaven at 1750 Crystal Drive has shifted locations over decades, but it's always stayed in the subterranean mall. However, following last month's announcement that
Alban Odoulamy has been running Puppet Heaven, or puppet shops by other names, in Crystal City for 18 years, but his heart isn't in it like it used to be. Odoulamy emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1990s from the small, French-speaking West African country of Benin, where he had worked in production and set
For nearly 50 years, Jack Levonian’s photography store has occupied a small piece of subterranean real estate in Arlington, a catacomb called the Crystal City Underground. Levonian and his Metro Camera shop moved in after the underground mall opened in 1976. It was the happening place to be back then, he says, a shopping center