Summit Place Mall (Waterford Township, MI) (1963-2009)

[Hudsons81]

Summit Place Mall was the first enclosed mall in Metro Detroit. It was located 24 miles northwest of downtown Detroit in Waterford Township in Oakland County, immediately west of the city of Pontiac. When it opened as the (Pontiac) Mall in 1963, anchors included a two-story Montgomery Ward and a one-story Hudson's Budget Store, with a Kresge located right in the center of the mall. There was also a Food Fair (note: this Food Fair was a chain based in Detroit that was completely unrelated to the chain of the same name in the Northeast) supermarket in a separate building near Montgomery Ward. It was later rebranded as Farmer Jack in 1967. In the mid 1960's, the Hudson's Budget Store expanded into a second story and became a full-line Hudson's.

Two new separate outlot buildings were constructed in the early 1970's, at the northern end of the property: one building housed a two-story Sears and the other was the Pontiac Mall Cinema I & II.

A massive remodeling project began in 1988. First, a two-story JCPenney was built at the western end of a corridor that led west from Montgomery Ward at the northern end of the existing mall. Next, a new corridor was added that started at JCPenney and ran north to the 14-restaurant Picnic Food Court and from there to a one-story Main Street (a regional department store chain based in suburban Chicago), which was acquired by and rebranded as Kohl's only months later. Finally, another new corridor was added that connected Main Street/Kohl's to the existing Sears. Once all of this was completed in 1990, the mall was renamed Summit Place Mall.

Three large strip centers would be constructed around this time in the vicinity of Summit Place Mall. One of these contained the first Best Buy in Michigan, which opened in 1993 and has since closed. However, Summit Place Mall would enter a long death spiral in the early 1990's, when smoking was banned within the mall. Hudson's downsized it's store, with the western half retenanted by Service Merchandise, which later closed in March 1999. Montgomery Ward closed with the chain in late 2000 and Hudson's was rebranded as Marshall Field's in 2001. By this point, Summit Place Mall suffered declining revenue since the 1998 opening of Great Lakes Crossing (Outlets), an enclosed outlet mall located in nearby Auburn Hills. General Growth Properties would sell the mall to Namco Financial in 2002. Namco then proposed a third name for the mall, Festivals of Waterford, as well as a children's play area and water park in the former Montgomery Ward. The play area opened in December 2002, but the water park plan was abandoned.

Marshall Field's was then rebranded as Macy's in September 2006. Around this time, vacancies both in the mall itself as well as in the three strip centers skyrocketed. In March 2009, Kohl's shuttered it's location in Summit Place Mall, later that year, on September 19, the mall itself (sans Macy's, JCPenney and Sears) was shuttered completely. However, JCPenney shut down in January 2010, followed by Macy's in March. As a result, Sears is the only store still operating.

Demolition and redevelopment plans have come and gone, though none have ever made it past the planning stage. In the meantime, the mall continues to deteriorate and rot and it's unknown how long Sears will last before it too closes.

[Hudsons81]

UPDATE: Sears called it quits in December 2014, thus leaving Summit Place Mall entirely vacant.

I have no idea how long it's just gonna sit there empty before it gets bulldozed.