JC Reindl

Detroit Free Press

Countless shoppers visited metro Detroit's Northland Center mall during its 61 years of business.

Yet only a few ever saw the elaborate system of service tunnels that still exists beneath the nation's first regional shopping mall, which closed last April and could face demolition as early as this summer.

The underground tunnels opened with the mall in 1954 and were primarily used for making truck deliveries to Northland's stores, but also for storage, workshop space and even nuclear bomb shelters.

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The tunnel network begins with a winding roadway that branches off into passageways connecting subterranean rooms, decrepit stairwells and non-working elevator shafts. Narrow, barely walkable tunnels extend to the mall's old central power plant as well as a now-closed police substation and a nearby Firestone garage.

The entire network runs several miles and includes an astounding 484 rooms, said Jerry Witkowski, a former code enforcement official for Southfield. The tunnels emerge at two large garage doors at opposite ends of the mall.

"It's just room after room after room like this," Witkowski said last week, standing before a pitch-black room of unfinished concrete and exposed pipes. "It's like a labyrinth."

Cut off from power and heat, the dark passageways are currently navigable only by flashlight and have a post-apocalyptic look and feel. A film crew used the gritty surroundings late last year to shoot action scenes for a movie.

A rare tour of the site last week revealed several rooms filled with mall leftovers, such as obsolete computer parts and TVs that weren't sold during last year's Northland liquidation auction. Other rooms are locked behind metal doors and might never be opened again.

Headless mannequins and piles of fur coats can be found in one room. Another contains furniture and a Santa Claus statuette. Yet another has a mysteriously long conveyor belt and several 1980s arcade games with the electronic innards ripped out.

Missing were any signs of a long-rumored rat infestation within the tunnels. The only creatures spotted were a dozen dead cockroaches, scattered around an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey in an old carpentry workshop.

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Precurser to other suburban malls

Northland's unique system of service tunnels was one of several 20th-century innovations built into the Victor Gruen-designed mall.

Originally developed as an open-air shopping center by the J.L Hudson Co., Northland proved that people were willing to bypass the downtown Detroit department stores and do their shopping in the emerging suburbs.

Northland inspired numerous other shopping mall developments and was expanded several times, becoming an enclosed mall in the early 1970s. The 1.4-million-square-foot building finally shut its doors last year following a long and steady decline in business and number of tenants.

In December, the city of Southfield bought the 114-acre property for $2.4 million to gain control over the site and its future redevelopment. Included in the deal was the massive four-story Macy's building — formerly Hudson's — but not the old Target or J.C. Penney stores. Southfield officials say they are still in talks for those buildings with Target as well as Triumph Church, which bought the former J.C. Penney before the mall closed.

City officials also are in the process of hiring professionals to devise a plan for redeveloping Northland into a future mixed-use project and to help determine which mall buildings — if any — could possibly be reused, said Al Aceves, executive director of the Southfield Downtown Development Authority.

Most or all of Northland's underground tunnels would likely be razed as part of the site's demolition, which is estimated to cost $8 million to $10 million and likely take a full year. Aceves said he hopes the city can start fielding demolition proposals by the summer.

"We're going to have a big hole to fill with dirt," Aceves said.

Infinite places to hide

The underground tunnels were off limits to the shopping public when Northland was in business, and they remain closed today. But Susan Wassenberg walked almost all of them during her 28 years working security at the mall.

"When I first started, one of the guys in maintenance told me that he could hide there for over a month in those tunnels, and we still couldn't find him — there are that many places to hide," she said last week. "And he was right."

But one tunnel that Wassenberg wouldn't explore was the tube connecting the mall to its central power station. Some of her colleagues, though, decided to try.

"One midnight I was working and there were two officers and myself," she recalled. "I hadn't heard from them, and finally I got a hold of them on the radio. I said 'Where are you?' and they said, 'We're in one of the tunnels.' But they said the water's got to be up to their knees and they turned back."

Gaven King, Northland's former head of security, who is still employed to guard the site, knew of no tunnel trespassing or mall break-ins since Northland closed.

He and Wassenberg do recall how there were once yellow-and-black nuclear fallout shelter signs posted in the tunnels. However, each of those Cold War relics disappeared during the mall's final months and likely were snapped up as souvenirs.

Deserted mall used for movie scenes

Upstairs, Northland Center today is a giant ghost town of deserted storefronts. There are no people, no sounds and no merchandise. A lone red Target shopping cart rests beneath the center of a still-working spotlight, which casts a surreal glow down a long corridor.

The empty mall was used for several days in late fall to film scenes for an upcoming war-related movie that has yet to be publicly announced. About 100 people were inside the mall for the filming, which included gunfire scenes shot in the tunnels and upstairs in the mall's former Taco Bell, said Clayton Perry, 35, a former Ferndale resident who worked on sound production.

Another scene required mounting a large, still-intact map of the Moscow subway system in the mall.

"Northland mall was tough to shoot in actually because they had no electricity, no running water, no bathrooms, no heat," he said, adding that portable toilets had to be trucked in.

Nondisclosure agreements preclude Perry from sharing too many details of the movie, which has the working title "Gold Rush" and could be connected to a future video game. He said the basic plot unfolds in a fictionalized eastern Europe and involves multiple gunfire scenes. Additional scenes were filmed at other spots in metro Detroit, including at the old Packard Plant.

As for the future of Northland, Southfield Mayor Ken Siver said the city has been receiving calls every week from people interested in taking part or helping with the property's redevelopment.

What that redevelopment would be comprised of and look like — or even be called — is to be determined. But the Northland name will likely be buried for good, along with the 1950s tunnels.

"We want to totally rebrand it," Siver said. "It will never be Northland anymore. That name has to go away."

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl.

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