The Last Days of Eastland Center

Eastland Center in Harper Woods, MI was developed and opened in 1957 by Hudson’s as an open-air mall. It was enclosed in 1975, and became the go-to mall and gathering space for many thousands of east siders from 1975 until about 2009. Four parking lot shootings that occurred between 2010 and 2017 frightened away the bulk of the mall’s clientele, and it was never able to recover. Eastland will be demolished in 2022 after years of slow decline, to be replaced by a group of warehouse structures. I began regular sessions of “mall walking” at Eastland whenever the weather was too cold, hot, rainy or wintery, so I was able to document the dramatic decline in 2020 and 2021 during those walks. These photos are mostly from my cellphone camera, but still capture many of the shuttered storefronts and odd manikin displays that portray a deliberate urban culture. On many occasions, the pure emptiness was eerie. I could often walk the entire one-mile circuit without seeing a single person other than a wandering security guard. If a mall could be a ghost town, Eastland was on its way to being one. My photos are mere documentation of a dying shopping mall, and do not purport to be great photography. There’s a lot of mall-style architectural beauty that will be destroyed very soon, and I’m saddened to see it being tossed away.