In the suburbs of the Motor City, the mall reigns supreme.  So much so, in fact, that the retail hubs in the Detroit area are located completely within the suburban realm.  There are no major retail draws in the city of Detroit today, which isn’t surprising because Detroit is largely a vastly depressing urban wasteland.  Though urban revival attempts continue, much of the city of Detroit is the most horrific example of rust belt economics and white flight.  As factories moved out of the area, taking tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of jobs with them, the city went fallow.  Today, large swaths of Detroit remain completely abandoned.  Entire city blocks which once had houses and activity have essentially returned to nature as prairie grasses and wilderness has grown up through condemned structures, many of which were arsoned.  Poverty is also an issue in Detroit, as over one-quarter of the city is beneath the poverty line.  

Despite the condition of the city itself, there is a relatively healthy economy in the Detroit metro area suburbs.  In fact, a stark contrast exists as many areas of northern and western Oakland county, along with areas by the St. Clair shores such as the various Grosse Pointes have some of the highest per-capita incomes in the United States. 

Livonia, Michigan is a thoroughly blue collar, middle-class suburb directly west of the city of Detroit.  With a population of about 100,000, Livonia sprang up from the dust during the post-war building boom.  In fact, it ceased growing completely during the 1970s, and has been shrinking ever-so-slightly since as people move farther out to newer and “better” suburbs.

Livonia was home to three enclosed malls until fairly recently.  Wonderland Mall, which was enclosed in 1985, closed in 2003 after a protracted period of failure and was finally demolished in 2006 for a Wal-Mart Supercenter.  Laurel Park Place, which trends upscale, opened in 1989 in far northwestern Livonia along I-275, and is very successful.  Livonia Mall, their third mall, opened in 1964 at 7 Mile Road and Middlebelt.  Anchored by Sears, Kresge and Kroger, the mall grew in pieces over the years and decades.  A southern wing was added anchored by Detroit-based Crowley’s in 1972.  Nine years later in 1981 Mervyn’s arrived with a new northern wing.  K-Mart closed Kresge in 1987 with the rest of the Kresge locations, and soon after a Child World/Children’s Palace opened up in the spot which lasted until the early to mid 1990s.  In 2000, the Crowley’s chain dissolved and became Crowley’s Value City, which is now just Value City and part of the Columbus, Ohio based chain.  In 2006, Mervyns left the north end of the mall as the chain pulled out of Michigan and other regions to focus on their core western and southern markets.  Today, only Sears and Value City remain, with a rather ragged roster of in-line tenants.

In terms of decor and design, Livonia Mall is very dark and outdated inside and out.  It hasn’t actually been remodeled since it opened, so there are many wooden store facades and ancient signage.  A favorite is the Koney Island location near one of the southern entrances, which is clearly a decades-old fixture in the mall and still in operation.  Also, the mall features a unique coffee shop-style restaurant right smack dab in the middle of the mall near the northern end.  The Child World/Children’s Palace distinctive castle design is also still present at the western end of the mall, which was most recently a paintball facility.  Another interesting feature is the way the mall corridor snakes around sears and exits beside it, making the mall significantly larger.  Also, several ancient fountains exist within the mall which are great throwbacks to a bygone era of retail aesthetics.

So what’s killied Livonia Mall?  Aside from the decor issues and outdatedness, which definitely accounts significantly for the loss of traffic, the mall’s roster and offerings cannot compete with the newer mall across town at Laurel Park Place.  In addition, other nearby west suburban malls like Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn and Westland Center in Westland have updated and modernized continuously despite being decades old.  Shoppers continue to flock there, and the competition from all of these, as well as super-regional draws in Troy and Novi are sucking traffic away in droves.  Livonia Mall might sustain itself and avoid the sinking-ship phenomenon, but only if it repositions itself as a successful ancillary to the larger malls. 

In 2006, plans were announced to disenclose the outdated mall and build the ever-popular Lifestyle Center in its place, but fell through because negotiations failed with the Sears anchor, which owns its space separate of the mall. 

As of May 2007, the mall is still in operation.  Many of the in-line stores are increasingly local stores and services, rather than traditional national tenants.  Livonia Mall is currently ailing, and our prediction is that the mall will go downhill significantly fast in the near future if rehab isn’t done.  We’ll put this one on death watch for now, but at least we can enjoy the pictures.  

Livonia Mall in April 2001:

Livonia Mall in July 2006:

When Prangeway and I were taking a lot of road trips in 1998 and 1999, I was always trying to convince him (him being the, um, the one who owned a car) to go to the other malls in a lot of the random midwestern cities we visited. It seems that each time we tried, we hit pay dirt. Kalamazoo was a great example.

The Maple Hill Mall was located on route 43 on Kalamazoo’s west side, separate from the more successful and larger mall in Portage, on the south side. Built in 1971, Maple Hill Mall was the dominant mall in the Kalamazoo area for some time before the 1981 opening of Portage’s Crossroads Mall. The two malls coexisted for some time, but Maple Hill Mall went into decline in the 1990s. Apparently there was a plan around 2000 to try and revitalize the mall, but the loss of both Steketee’s and Montgomery Ward sealed its fate. Maple hill mall was also directly across the street from former Westmain Mall, about which little is known. Perhaps our readers can clue us in.

For some reason, we found ourselves in Kalamazoo quite late in the evening, and visited Maple Hill Mall several hours after it closed for the evening. Since everything was closed, the place seemed eerie even then, even though it was reasonably well-tenanted at the time. The anchors then were still Montgomery Ward, Steketee’s, and Target, plus there was a very bizarre Office Max store whose footprint stepped obtrusively into the mall itself (check thefloorplan at the bottom of this page to see what I mean). We waltzed around the vacant mall for a good ten minutes or so before a bike cop (!) came wheeling out of nowhere around Office Max’s poison corner to tell us that the mall was closed (obviously) and that we should leave. This was early 1999.

It’s unsurprising that the Maple Hill Mall was demolished and replaced with a power center in 2004; it was obvious even seven years ago that the poor old place had become a weak player and that it had lost its prominence. We didn’t take any of our own pictures, but thanks to Labelscar reader and commenter Bobby, we have an eerie set of pictures taken before the whole thing was knocked down. The whole set of pictures from his visit is available on his site Forgotten Michigan, along with a more complete history of Maple Hill Mall.

Sometimes instead of being redeveloped into strip malls and “Lifestyle Centers”, enclosed malls are simply forgotten, passed over like so much fruit cake in December. The reasons for this are varied, but mostly have to do with the fact that the area the mall lies in is no longer viable for retail, or at least the kind of retail that spawns big box and expansive strip malls.

Dort Mall, along Dort Highway on the south side of Flint, is one of these malls. Dort Mall opened as the Flint area’s first enclosed mall, in 1963, on the site of the former Dort Drive-In Theatre. In its earlier days, it was originally anchored by a Yankee store and possibly Cunningham’s and A&P. Yankee was later bought out by Zody’s, and after Zody’s disappeared it became Sears Outlet. The Sears Outlet closed somewhat recently and was split into Perani’s Hockey World, Bargain Hunterz thrift store, and a bingo hall. The north end of the mall currently houses a Big Lots which does not have access into the indoor portion of the mall. Also worth mention is the giant “Muffler man” type statue on the south end of the mall. Could this be Farmer Jack in a former Farmer Jack location?

The indoor part of Dort Mall isn’t spartan or barren by any means, like many dead malls. Today, the mall is filled with Americana like old gas station signs, advertisements and paraphernalia from General Motors products, and signs galore. However, only a couple shops exist within the mall which do not have outdoor entrances, notably one which exclusively sells T-shirts. Only a few people go inside Dort Mall today, and I don’t imagine all the old signs are that much of a draw. I took these pictures of Dort Mall in August 2005.

Dear readers, I’m back from my extended weekend in the Detroit area.  Why Detroit, you ask?  Well, the area has always fascinated me beyond belief.  The way the entire city is this fallow wasteland, seeming as though it is sleeping, like some sort of urban garden that hasn’t been watered in a while.  Juxtapose that with the booming, successful suburbs, which is where most of the commerce in the metro Detroit area takes place, and it makes for an interesting exploration.  Not to mention all the abandoned neighborhoods that have been converted to this eerie urban prairie of overgrown grasses, trees, and weeds.   And the malls.  Nearly all of the malls in the metro Detroit area have some interesting design features about them, whether they’re extremely dated, nearly dead, or remarkably amazing and successful.  Not surprisingly, Summit Place Mall in northwest suburban Waterford is no exception.

Summit Place Mall opened in 1962 along Telegraph Road in the midst of Oakland County’s suburban boom.  While the mall is technically located in Waterford Township, across Telegraph is the city of Pontiac.  Oakland county’s most urban city, Pontiac is definitely separate from the suburban millieu that sprawls across much of Oakland County; it is its own city, and grew up not only because of Detroit but in tandem with it as well.  It should also be mentioned here that Oakland County is the richest county in the state of Michigan, and aside from the Grosse Pointe areas along the shores of Lake St. Clair, it houses the cities with the highest per-capita income.  Essentially, when everything (and everyone) left the city of Detroit, it came to places like Oakland County, leaving behind massive swaths of wasteland in Detroit, but concurrently building up a sprawling infrastructure of suburbia: Interstate highways, subdivisions, commercial and industrial parks, and shopping malls.

When Summit Place Mall opened, it was much smaller than it is today.  It had two anchor stores: Hudson’s and Montgomery Ward, and a row of stores along an enclosed hallway between them.  In 1973, a Sears was attached to the north end of the mall; however, the mall portion was not extended to Sears.  Instead, Sears was essentially a standalone store tacked onto the north side of the mall.  Eventually, developers realized the potential with this burgeoning, successful property and opened a JCPenney store behind Wards on the west side of the mall in 1988.  Also during 1988, the mall was extended to JCPenney from Ward’s and again extended to the north to Sears, making it mall accessible for the first time after 15 years.  By 1990, the mall added a Mainstreet (later and currently Kohl’s) store between Wards and Sears and a new food court was built to accomodate trends and the massive shopping crowds.  A Service Merchandise was also added to the Hudson’s (Marshall Field’s) end of the mall.  During the 1990s, this mall was the place to be.  Several large strip malls were built on the outlots or just across from the mall, including a Sam’s Club, Target, HQ, Builders Square, Circuit City, major grocery, Sports Authority, and Best Buy, with space for even more.  

The pinnacle of success was breached in about 1995, with the closure of HQ in the plaza on the north outlot of the mall.  Shockingly, and as a testament to the mall’s dramatically fast failure, the HQ stands vacant and preserved today.  However, the mall continued to prosper into the late 1990s until a deafening blow came with the opening of Great Lakes Crossing, a major, outlet/hybrid (think the Mills malls) enclosed mall in Auburn Hills, just a few miles away.  The grocery store (Farmer Jack) and Sports Authority closed up shop, leaving more vacancies in the outlots.  In 2001, the mall saw more changes and another blow as Montgomery Ward closed up shop.  Also in 2001, Hudson’s was rebranded Marshall Fields, though the store essentially remained the same aside from the name change.  Many national brand retailers left the mall for greener pastures (Great Lakes Crossing) and also stores in the outlots left as well.  From the late 90s to the early 2000s, the mall’s vacancy rate jumped from 20% to 50%.  The mall was sold.

Today, there are talks about what can be done with this giant center to make it profitable again.  In her Oakland Press article, Lara Mossa wrote that in November of 2005 there were plans to demolish approximately half of the center and replace it with housing, making the mall a mixed-use development.  She also reported that the new owner Namco also wanted to put a water park in the mall, but was unable to find the financing to do so.  The article also reports the dramatically fast downturn of the mall.  As recently as 1998, the mall employed 1800 people; today it employs 400.  Other reports from more unofficial sources have heard rumors that the entire mall will be torn down for a condo development.

The decor of Summit Place is also interesting.  Since many stores abruptly left since the late 1990s, many storefronts which are vacant are quite dated.  Some vacant storefronts have ads for other stores in the mall, notably for Marshall Field’s.  A large child’s play area sits on the concourse with the most stores, the original concourse between Marshall Field’s and dead Montgomery Ward.  Between Montgomery Ward and Sears the stores are sparse, and all the way down by the Kohl’s wing there is almost no activity whatsoever.  The food court has one lone pretzel vendor.  Between Montgomery Ward and Sears there is also a very strange display of plastic trees and stuffed animals that is almost disturbing.      

What will become of Summit Place Mall?  Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: the 1.5 million square foot center is far too large for its current demand.  However sad the mall is, though, people still continue to shop there.  The Marshall Field’s is slated to become a Macy’s in mid-2006 and will not close, at least right away.  The Sears and Kohl’s at the mall do fine for themselves, it’s just the two dozen or so remaining tenants in the mall that are problematic.  If anyone has any more info, contributions are always welcome.  Pictures taken by me, July 2006.