The Palace of Auburn Hills: three banners, then a vacant field

For thirty years, if you wanted to see the Detroit Pistons, you drove out to a cornfield-turned-parking-ocean in Auburn Hills. The Palace of Auburn Hills opened in 1988, built by Pistons owner Bill Davidson out past the edge of the suburbs, and it changed how American arenas were built — it was one of the first to ring the seating bowl with private suites, the luxury boxes that every team would soon want. Other owners came to tour it and copied the idea.

The basketball was the part people remember. The Pistons won all three of their NBA championships as a Palace team — the back-to-back “Bad Boys” titles in 1989 and 1990, and the upset of the Lakers in 2004 — and the building got loud in a way that became part of the franchise’s identity. It hosted concerts and the WNBA’s Shock too, a workhorse venue that was still in fine shape when its time ran out.

That’s the strange part: nothing was wrong with the Palace when the Pistons left. The team moved downtown to Little Caesars Arena in 2017 chasing the new logic that fans wanted a walkable city district, not a suburban parking lot. The Palace, suddenly without a tenant and too far from anything to repurpose easily, was sold off. Demolition started in early 2020, and in July of that year the roof was brought down with explosives. A 22,000-seat arena was a field of rubble.

The ground didn’t stay empty long. General Motors bought the site and planned a major electric-vehicle parts plant there — a return, in a way, to what built this county in the first place. So the place that gave Oakland County three basketball banners is set to spend its next life making car parts, the cycle this region knows best.