Roseville's Macomb Mall, walking indoors since 1964

The idea sounds quaint now, but in 1964 it was a genuine novelty: a place where you could walk from store to store without ever stepping outside. Macomb Mall opened that fall at Gratiot Avenue and Masonic Boulevard in Roseville, one of the early enclosed malls in the Detroit area — covered, heated, and air-conditioned, so a January shopping trip didn’t mean a parka and a slushy parking lot between every store. On opening night, families drove in from all over the east side just to see it.

The Schostak Brothers of Detroit built it, and the anchor stores read like a roll call of mid-century Michigan retail: Sears, Crowley’s, and Kresge — the dime-store chain a Detroiter named S. S. Kresge had founded, the same company that would later launch Kmart. A two-screen movie theater opened by Sears the next year, because a mall, the thinking went, should be somewhere you spent the whole afternoon. A bigger expansion in 1986 added a third anchor and more than 40 new stores.

Most malls from that era are gone now — demolished, or sitting empty with the fountains drained. Macomb Mall is still open, still anchored at the same Gratiot corner where the first shoppers pulled in more than sixty years ago. The stores have turned over many times, the dime-store names long retired, but the thing it was built to be — a warm, dry, lit-up place to walk on a gray Michigan day — still works exactly as designed.