On a late November afternoon, just a few days before Black Friday, the Westland Shopping Center looked more like a scene from a dystopian movie than a mall nearing Christmas.
The more than 1 million-square-foot mall has many dark, permanently closed stores behind locked metal gates. The cavernous halls were dim and nearly devoid of shoppers, with just a few mall walkers in sight, including Jean and Howard Ward.
“This mall is probably 40% occupied, with 60% of the stores gone,” estimates Howard, a Garden City resident who has been coming to the mall for eight years with his wife. “Even Santa doesn’t have anybody.”
He waved a hand over to where Santa Claus sat alone, gazing up at burned out light bulbs and water stains on the ceiling.
“This mall is 50-years-old and looks like it has never been renovated,” Ward continued. “The bathrooms are medieval.”
The mall could soon meet the fate of other giant shopping centers like Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights, Summit Place Mall in Waterford and Westland’s metro Detroit “directional” counterparts – including Northland and Eastland, all of which closed and are figments of the past.
“Northland was bulldozed and is gone,” Jeff Stoltman, Wayne State University marketing professor, said. “Many shopping centers are going that route. There’s a better use for the property.”
Stoltman reflected on the changing retail landscape, the passing of the mall heyday, and what is next for many of the behemoths that have claimed massive swaths of land across America for upward of 75 years.
Laurel Park Place in Livonia looks remarkably similar to the dystopia of Westland on a mid-November evening, with closed stores, few people and an uncertain future.
“The mall has really good days and really sad days,” said Sherry Gazdag, who owns Clocks, Rocks & More and has worked in the mall off and on since 2020. “There is not enough traffic.”
But some malls still have life, Stoltman said, like Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, where General Manager Scott Lofton estimated earlier this year that 175 stores were occupied out of about 180, with new stores coming in 2026.
“We have had continued success,” Lofton said. “We react to all the different changes in retail… Over time things change and you gotta change with it.”
Stoltman agrees, and added that it will be survival of the fittest for malls, which must adapt or die.
Boom and bust for retail’s behemoths
The concept of malls – enclosed spaces with many different retailers – dates back to the 1800s, Stoltman said, but began to really take hold in the 1950s, amidst the post-World War II economic boom, the rise of car culture and with an abundance of available land in the growing suburbs.
In urban centers, there was no room for malls, let alone the vast parking lots they require, but with shoppers now having more mobility, malls began sprouting in metro areas around the Midwest. Some of the earliest ones were in Michigan and Minnesota, and on the East Coast, New Jersey was leading the way.
Mall construction boomed throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all following a similar blueprint – numerous small specialty retailers and restaurants on the interior and big name department stores as anchors.
George Barbalish and Sue Moore recall the boom times fondly, as they now sit on a bench surrounded by empty stores in a Westland Mall that has clearly gone bust.
“I came here when the mall opened in 1965,” Barbalish said. “It was fabulous, Christmas was beautiful. It was packed.”
Moore wistfully remembers bygone stores including Marianne’s, Winkelman’s, Albert’s, Sears and Silverman’s.
“When you’ve seen what there was in days past, what you see now is sad,” she said.
Barbalish and Moore, along with Bridget and Dave Carbott, who walk at Laurel Park Place regularly, attribute the sad state of the malls to online shopping, a downfall perhaps hastened by the Covid pandemic.
“The small business owners are doing all they can to keep it alive,” Bridget Carbott said. “We like brick and mortar, people still want to touch and feel the items. But (Laurel Park Place) could probably use some variety, like a Crate & Barrel. They used to be more upscale. What we have now is not representative of that.”
Theresa Gray, owner of Granny’s Unique Crafts & Gifts, moved her store into Laurel Park Place in July after lasting less than a month at Fairlane Mall in Dearborn, where the Christmas decorations were still up in April and she said the mall deteriorated “because of the clientele.”
She wanted a spot where she could showcase crafts from various vendors year-round instead of only at shows. Still, it isn’t looking great for her at Laurel Park Place either.
“People don’t want to shop at the mall anymore,” laments Gray. “They’d rather sit at home on the computer and have it delivered to their house.”
Stoltman agrees that the rise of e-commerce and Covid are large factors in the change in shopping habits, but said it was a combination of forces that has hurt malls, including an oversaturation of them.
The other story, he continued, was as malls were hitting their peak, power centers came along. Big box stores like Home Depot and Best Buy formed drive-up shopping plazas with Walmart and Target.
Thus began the ultimate decline of department store anchors and malls themselves.
“It’s all about real estate development and traffic patterns,” Stoltman said, noting that retail develops around major transportation routes and physical geography. “Suburban sprawl slows down, the rise of e-commerce explodes and it takes away from fixed space, real world shopping options.”
Malls became parodies of themselves, known as a place for “mall rats,” with kids hanging out and wreaking havoc. It was a turn-off to older shoppers and families and consumers began to express more of an interest in specialized retail experiences.
A new landscape on the horizon
Unique, niche retail experiences could play a key role in mall survival.
Anchor stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and JCPenney are “hanging on by their fingernails, on a death watch,” Stoltman said, as is Oakland Mall, but he cites Twelve Oaks, Great Lakes Crossing and Somerset Collection as examples of malls that are currently successful.
Within the past six years, Twelve Oaks lost two anchor stores, Sears and Lord & Taylor, as well as fast fashion retailer Forever 21, which occupied a massive space in the mall’s interior. But in 2026, Twelve Oaks will fill the empty Sears space with Round1 Bowling and Arcade; Primark, a European clothing retailer; and Dick’s House of Sport, an offshoot of Dick’s Sporting Goods, which includes athletic facilities indoors and out.
This fall, the mall welcomed a Toys ‘R Us store and celebrated the relocation of Pottery Barn to a larger space. Remodels of mainstays like Victoria’s Secret, Bath and Bodyworks, Garage, Pandora and Hollister have helped keep the mall fresh, GM Lofton said.
Great Lakes Crossing has found its spot as an outlet mall that draws visitors in with accompanying entertainment options like Legoland, SEA LIFE Michigan Aquarium, and an AMC movie theater.
Somerset Collection appeals to upscale shoppers with many stores not found elsewhere in the region.
But Westland and Livonia do not have the concentration of wealth found in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Troy, Stoltman noted. There are still too many malls, and for a quarter-century now, they have played the replacement game with stores – trying to find the right tenant mix for a space that is too large in an era of e-commerce. Stoltman likens it to shuffling chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic.
Whether Westland Mall and Laurel Park Place can right their ships remains to be seen.
In an email, Dan Dilmanian, chief operating officer of Namdar Realty Group, which owns Westland Shopping Center, acknowledged that the mall is at “an important crossroads in its lifecycle.”
Namdar, which owns nearly 400 properties, including retail, office, multi-family and mixed-use developments, is “actively exploring options” for Westland Mall’s future in collaboration with city leaders, Dilmanian wrote.
Alex Garza, Westland’s chief business development officer, confirmed in an email that the city has been “actively engaged” with Namdar on the mall’s future.
“The mall’s current state doesn’t reflect Westland’s trajectory, and that’s exactly why we’re collaborating for transformative change,” Garza said. “Together with mall ownership, we’re exploring bold options that would re-energize this gateway and complement the investments our city is making for our community’s future.”
CBL Properties, owner of Laurel Park Place, is also “in the early stages of exploring redevelopment opportunities for the property,” Stacey Keating, vice-president of corporate communications, wrote in an email. She added that it was too early to share any specifics.
Stoltman said developers in some places have begun using a mixed-use playbook to convert shopping spaces to fitness and wellness centers, office complexes and housing.
But conversions of massive malls offers a unique challenge.
“There is no other way to use that volume,” Stoltman said. “Sometimes it is cost prohibitive – the way air circulation is managed in those spaces, the electrical conduits, it’s not easy to refit them for another purpose.”
To close the mall and completely repackage it as something new would also mean ending leases for whoever is still operating and shutting down cash flow.
Bulldozing the malls and starting over would also mean ripping up the sea of concrete surrounding them.
All of it could be a decades-long process, like it has been with the former Kmart world headquarters in Troy, which sat vacant for nearly 20 years until the tear down started at the end of 2023. That site is only a quarter to a half of the size of some of the mall properties. In August, workers broke ground for a University of Michigan Health complex on the 40-acre property which could anchor a mixed-use development including up to 750 units of housing, a 250-room hotel, 300,000 square feet of retail space and 500,000 square feet of office space. It is expected to take years to construct in phases.
Stoltman plans to watch closely for any action at the Livonia and Westland malls.
“I will be following to see what happens to these properties,” he said. “The nature of the economy is they all grew into these spaces when the economy was booming, and the economy is not booming anymore. When the getting is good, everyone wants to get, and now that the getting is not good, they are gone.”
Contact reporter Susan Bromley at [email protected].
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