When Kmart ran a retail empire from Big Beaver Road in Troy

For a stretch of the late twentieth century, one of the biggest retailers in America was run out of an office complex on Big Beaver Road in Troy. The blue light, the Bluelight Specials, the thousands of Kmart stores from coast to coast — the orders all came from here, a few exits up I-75 from Detroit.

The company’s roots ran deep in Michigan. Sebastian S. Kresge built a chain of five-and-dime stores starting in 1899, and the S. S. Kresge Company became one of the country’s great dime-store empires. In 1962 it launched a new idea — a big discount department store called Kmart, the first one opening that year in Garden City, west of Detroit. The format took off so fast that within fifteen years Kmart sales were nearly the whole business, and in 1977 the company simply renamed itself Kmart Corporation.

By then it had already left the city. In 1972 the headquarters moved from Detroit out to the new complex on Big Beaver in Troy, part of the broader corporate migration to the suburbs that reshaped Oakland County’s office corridors. For three decades the campus hummed.

Then the slide. Kmart fell behind newer rivals, went through bankruptcy, merged, and in 2005 moved its headquarters to Illinois. The Troy building emptied out in 2006 and just sat there, a vast vacant box, while one redevelopment plan after another stalled. The wrecking crews finally arrived in late 2023. Drive Big Beaver now and the empire’s old nerve center is gone — cleared ground where a company that started with a Michigan dime store once told thousands of stores what to stock.