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. One long oval corridor carries you past store after store and drops you, eventually, right back where you started. Mall people call it a racetrack layout. It is Michigan’s largest indoor outlet center. 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. Full-price shops and a long row of restaurants are mixed in. 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. There’s a SEA LIFE aquarium with a walk-through underwater tunnel, plus a LEGOLAND Discovery Center. Add 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.

Auburn Hills already keeps company with big employers and a stadium-scaled neighbor or two. For the city, the loop is steady work and a 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. It’s somewhere warm to wander with friends and no particular plan, which the racetrack layout practically encourages.