Jim LaRue's Commentary:

I firmly believe that the socialization of Clinton Valley Center mental patients created a very negative impression on shoppers, and were a major factor in reduced shoppers and the eventual closure of the mall.

The Clinton Valley Center, originally known as the Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, was a mental institution that housed several hundred patients up until its closure and demolition. It was located on Elizabeth Lake Road about 1/2 mile from Summit Place Mall. Most patients were there under court order as a danger to themselves or others.

The Summit Place Mall was still pretty viable when my wife's cousin was a manager at one of the stores in the mall in the late 1980's - early 1990's. Because of her employment there we visited the mall regularly. I was shocked to see vans pulling up to the mall's entrance and releasing patients to walk around the mall freely. This mostly occurred during business hours on weekdays.

According to my wife's cousin, this apparently was done to re-socialize the patient to society. In my humble opinion it was more likely to off-load a lot of disturbed people due to either under-staffing at the Clinton Valley Center or administrative negligence. There were few if any Clinton Valley Center "handlers" present at the mall. Imagine dozens of mental patients with little concept of personal restating or correct behavior being turned loose at your favorite mall, wandering away from the one or two handlers there to keep an eye on them. In the event one of the mental patients did something wrong, the store manager were to call mall security or mall management. They would then either call the Clinton Valley Center or take the troublemaker into custody. I spoke to a mall security officer. They were understaffed to handle the number of incidents from the furloughed patients.

Without too much detail, there were several incidents daily when the mental patients were there at the mall. Children shopping with parents were being approached and inappropriately touched. Adult shoppers were solicited or groped by patients. It was not unusual for patients to take all their clothes off. Patients climbed into the fountains. They shoplifted. They ate things out of trash cans. They took food off customer's trays in the food court. They exposed themselves to shoppers - regularly. They started fight with customers with little or no warning. Basically they scared the crap out of the shoppers. It bothered me enough that I did not want to go to the mall myself.

The position the mall was taking, according to my wife's cousin, was that the mall was a public place. There was a suspicion that the mall management was receiving some level of funding, perhaps from the state, to enable this to occur. I seem to recall my wife's cousin being employed there for two or three years, and this was occurring during that time. I have no clue how long it went on, and I had little desire to go to the mall due to the mental people there. I believe this was a big coffin nail for the mall.

The Clinton Valley Center was closed around 1997, and was demolished. Nothing remains of it, as a subdivision was built on the site. Michigan like many other state implemented a program called "Deinstitutionalization" for mental health patients. The concept was to remove people with profound mental problems from institutions, and instead house them in neighborhood group homes. Yup - those mental patients are now mostly unsupervised, often homeless, or in prison. Oh, and Summit Place Mall closed. One of the final major stores, a Sam's Club located on the service drive behind summit Place, is scheduled to soon close in early 2016 due to a profound lack of business.

John Good’s Commentary:

I have been to Great Lakes Crossing, a huge retail destination in Auburn Hills, many times, and have passed by Summit Place Mall most trips. I decided to check out what I had been missing December 2007.

Many people attribute Summit Place's failure to Great Lakes Crossing's development about 4 miles away. This might be true. GLC brought many firsts to Michigan (Rainforest Café, GameWorks, as well as the outlet stores for Neiman Marcus and Saks) when it opened in November 1998. Nine years was plenty of time for Great Lakes to poach Summit Place's traditional mall retailers, and by December 2007, except for GNC and RadioShack (perennial mall holdouts), Pacific Sunwear, Foot Locker, Claire's and Deb, this was pretty much what had happened. However, importantly, because Great Lakes Crossing is anchored by outlet/big box stores, the traditional mall anchor stores are still at Summit Place, catering to the desirable demographic around the mall. The mall still has Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, and Kohl's. The only vacant anchors are Montgomery Ward's (in a key location) and Service Merchandise. The operating anchors still seem to be doing rather well.

My visit in December 2007 was extremely depressing. For a super-regional mall with over 200 stores and 1.4 million square feet to be reduced to a series of empty hallways is sad. I entered on the north end of the mall by Kohl's and Sears, in what would find out later is the newest part. There is a pet store and the GNC in this area north of the food court, but that's about it. Heading south, I found the food court that was built in the 1989-1990 expansion nearly empty as well. In six storefronts, they had only one open: Hot Stix, whatever that is. Heading further south, I passed the Summit Place Community Room , the Foot Locker and a Kay Jewelers. To the left was the Montgomery Ward's, the only major anchor closed. On the right was the Pacific Sunwear, what I thought was an odd holdout. Turning left (east), I entered the 1988 JCPenney extension and soon after, the original 1963 mall, which was anchored on one end by Macy's and the other by the vacant Mo
ntgomery Ward's. This original hallway is completely empty except for the Deb, a mystical-looking home furnishings store, and a kiosk selling rugs. In the center, which was the original center court, was a skate park that I guess was set up hastily to try to re-attract people to the mall. At the far end was Macy's, which, oddly, looked to be recently remodeled. In the perpendicular hallway (east-west) by the Ward's end of the original mall, there is a montage of vintage photos from the history of Pontiac Mall/Summit Place, a fascinating display showing shots depicting the original sixties-style decor. It was in this hallway too that I got yelled at by a security guard for taking pictures. I put my camera away, but continued later.

What I thought was amazing was the scale of Summit Place. It is huge, and now a meandering set of (mostly) empty hallways. Although Great Lakes Crossing was definitely a factor, I think the fatal blow happened in 1973. It was then that Sears decided to build a story directly north of Ward's without a clear way that a mall would access it in the future. Thus, while Summit Place finally achieved this in 1990, the result was an awkward layout of many hallways, with no clear center. This, combined with the 2000 closing of Montgomery Ward (which was really the center of the mall; it had 2 entrances on two different corridors) that left a large hole at Summit Place, was what led to its downfall. The fall thus happened very quickly, between 2001/02, when it was probably still fairly busy, and today.

Plans for redeveloping it are underway by local government, but it still has a chance. With four successful anchors still there, and recent signs that Great Lakes Crossing has begun to falter (its Steve and Barry's has in fact relocated to Summit North, a power center north of Summit Place), Summit Place might regain its stature. It still has enviable demographics to its west, and for those people, this is the only mall that's convenient.

Pictures of Summit Place from December 2007 are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpgnexus/sets/72157603967253675/

A. Wellman’s Commentary:

I visited the Summit Place Mall on Monday, July 23, 2007. It was my first visit to the mall since some time in the 1980's, and needless to say, I was shocked to find the place virtually deserted. While there were a handful of open stores (a Payless, a trading card store, a store selling prom dresses and a store selling toys and

B.B. guns), for the most part the walk between the mall anchors was long and lonely. One fellow was working a kiosk, glancing up and trying in vain to get me to enter a contest as I walked down to the far end of the mall, and again on my walk back.

I had my camera with me, and was snapping away at the lowered gates and empty storefronts when a security guard approached me and asked why I was taking photos. My reply--"Because I've never seen anything like this before in my life"--seemed to satisfy him, but he explained to me that due to Homeland Security restrictions (???!!!???), I could not take any more photos. A shame, because the security station overlooked the food court, which had exactly one open establishement--the sight of an entire foodcourt with the chairs stacked neatly on every table at high noon was far and away the most bizarre sight of the entire visit.

I've been in some dying malls before (none as vacant, however) but what set the Summit Place Mall apart from other decaying malls was how immaculate the place was, almost to the point of being antiseptic; the floors were clean and shiny, the windows of the empty stores were polished, there was a complete lack of debris, dirt, graffiti and/or garbage. Clearly the Summit Place Mall is NOT a mall that has gone ghetto.

Jim’s Commentary:

Wow.

I walked through Summit Place Mall for the first time the other day. Although I'm from the general area, it's off of my usual radar screens, but I was driving by it, and thought that I would check out the sales at Macy's.

The Macy's store, which would have started as a Hudson's in the early 1960's, is huge-incredibly big by today's standards. Perhaps 3 times as large as an average Macy's now. Unfortunately, for all of that floor space, I saw maybe 2 dozen customers in the whole store at 6PM on a Tuesday night.

It's got the widest aisles you've ever seen in a department store, and that's because they're spacing out everything to make it look like the store is fully merchandised. Actually, it is very well stocked-but I can't imagine that they could turn that much in sales, just based on the lack of customers, and the lack of a mall outside the doors.....

Walk out of Macy's at the mall entrance, and it's eerie. All (and I mean all)
of the stores are dead. There's no "delete" walls in front of them-there's so many, they couldn't cover them all. The Victoria's Secret is first outside the door-judging by the immaculate decor, it was last redone in about 2003, and closed not that long after (2005?). Across the way is a circa 1980's redwood faced Casual Corner. There's a former Limited and empty jewelry stores and I believe a Gap and there's not a single national retailer in the mall now, with the exception of a Mrs. Fields. There's one restaurant in the entire circa 1989 food court.

There are a couple of storefronts turned into local non-profit theatre, and a few (maybe five) mom-and-pop businesses that don't know yet that they are doomed. This is a massive mall, perhaps almost a mile in length-and there is nothing, nothing, nothing there. It's a perfect movie set waiting to happen.

They must be tearing this down, and soon-it would cost too much to maintain as is. Interestingly, only one of the anchor properties is empty. Sears, Kohls, Penney's, and Macy's are all still in business-and I don't understand why.

This mall was really an indicator of Michigan's current economic woes to me (although 12 Oaks, which is about 10-15 miles away, is currently adding a massive wing with major new retail).