The Auburn Hills mall built as one long loop you can't get lost in

You can walk it for a mile and never double back, because the whole building is one continuous loop. Great Lakes Crossing Outlets, out at I-75 and Baldwin Road in Auburn Hills, opened in 1998 with that single idea baked into its shape: a long oval corridor that carries you past store after store and deposits you, eventually, right back where you started. Mall people call it a racetrack layout. It is Michigan’s largest indoor outlet center, and on a Saturday it pulls cars with plates from half the state.

The outlet part is the draw — brands selling their own goods straight, often at a cut, mixed in with full-price shops and a long row of restaurants. But the place stopped being just shopping a while ago. Over the years it has bolted on reasons to come even if nobody in the car needs anything: a SEA LIFE aquarium with a walk-through underwater tunnel, a LEGOLAND Discovery Center, a Round1 bowling-and-arcade barn, a Bass Pro Shops the size of a small lake, and a movie theater. On a gray, sleeting Michigan afternoon — and there are a lot of those — the all-indoors-under-one-roof part is the entire pitch.

For Auburn Hills, a city that already keeps company with big employers and a stadium-scaled neighbor or two, the loop is steady work and steady tax base, the kind of anchor that does not pull up stakes easily. And for a few generations of metro Detroit teenagers, “meet me at Great Lakes Crossing” has meant the same thing a downtown corner once did — somewhere warm to wander with friends and no particular plan, which the racetrack layout practically encourages.