GREAT LAKES CROSSING

'Great Lakes Crossing' is an enclosed shopping mall located in Auburn Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, United States. The mall features over 180 stores and outlets, as well as a 25-screen movie theater and food court.

Contents

History

Anchor stores

References

See also

External links

History

In 1991, the Mills Corporation planned to open a 2 million square foot shopping mall, called Auburn Mills, near wetlands along Baldwin and Joslyn Roads in the Auburn Hills area.^[1] The planned mall never came to fruition, however, due to local opposition.^[2] Later on, Taubman Corporation presented its own plans for an outlet mall to be built on the site where Auburn Mills would have been built. Taubman's mall, dubbed Great Lakes Crossing, was similar in design to the proposed Auburn Mills mall; however, Great Lakes Crossing featured a smaller design that proved to be less intrusive on adjacent wetlands.
The mall, with a design scheme based on Michigan's outdoors, opened in 1998 with over 200 stores laid out in a mile-long racetrack layout. In addition, the shopping center brought several "firsts" to the state of Michigan^[3], including Bass Pro Shops, GameWorks, Neiman Marcus Last Call Clearance Center, and Rainforest Cafe, as well as the first mall-based location for discount sportswear chain Steve & Barry's.^[4][5] In addition, Great Lakes Crossing included a food court and 25-screen movie theater. Despite bringing such "firsts" to its market, Great Lakes Crossing featured several vacancies from the start. Among these vacancies was a restaurant which Wolfgang Puck had planned to open, but did not, due to financial troubles.
J. C. Penney closed its outlet store at the mall in April 2002.^[6] Since the store's closure, Circuit City has opened in a portion of the former JCPenney Outlet, while some of the space is now The Children's Place. H&M now occupies the remaining space of the former J.C. Penney Outlet space, opening in June of 2007. Sportmart was acquired by Sports Authority and re-named; and Steve & Barry's closed in 2007. The Steve and Barry's space will be occupied by an expanded Urban Behavior store.

Anchor stores

★ Bed Bath & Beyond

★ Burlington Coat Factory

★ Bass Pro Shops

★ The Children's Place

★ Circuit City

★ H&M

★ Marshalls

★ Neiman Marcus Last Call Clearance Center

★ Off 5th

★ Sports Authority (former Sportmart; originally Oshman's)

★ TJ Maxx

★ AMC Star Theaters

References

1. Untitled article
2. City Council Meeting minutes, Great Lakes Crossing
3. Development Digest
4. FEATURE Steve & Barry's University Sportswear
5. DetFreePress.Retail.pdf
6. More churn for retail industry in '02

See also

★ Architecture of metropolitan Detroit

★ Metro Detroit

★ Tourism in metropolitan Detroit

External links

★ Shop Great Lakes Crossing Official Site