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Historic place

Great Lakes Crossing Outlets

4000 Baldwin Road, Auburn Hills, MI

Before it became Michigan's largest indoor outlet mall, the land off I-75 in Auburn Hills was forest, a small quarry, and a failed mall that was never built.

📅 1998–present🏛️ StoreStill hereBuilt 1998
Open on the mapSlide back to 1998
Great Lakes Crossing Outlets, 4000 Baldwin Road, Auburn Hills, MI
Great Lakes Crossing marquee off I-75 · Joetregembo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

Great Lakes Crossing opened on November 12, 1998, drawing more than 54,000 shoppers on its first day. It was developed by Taubman Centers, the Bloomfield Hills retail company, which had announced plans in 1996 to build the state's largest outlet center. The site had its own tangled history first: in 1990, Washington, D.C.-based Western Development Corporation proposed a mall called Auburn Mills on the same parcel, but the project collapsed amid the developer's financial troubles and was never built.

The mall was laid out as an oval corridor divided into themed "districts," each with its own decor and tenant mix, anchored at the start by names like Bass Pro Shops, GameWorks, a Neiman Marcus Last Call clearance center, and Rainforest Cafe. Anchors shifted over the years, and in late 2010 Taubman rebranded the property "Great Lakes Crossing Outlets" to lean into its value-retail identity. The center later added family attractions: SEA LIFE Michigan aquarium, LEGOLAND Discovery Center, and Round1 all arrived in the 2014-2016 stretch.

What's There Now

Still operating as Great Lakes Crossing Outlets, with SEA LIFE, LEGOLAND Discovery Center, Round1, and Rainforest Cafe still drawing families.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The site was never farmland in the romantic sense -- sources describe it as forest with a small quarry, and Taubman had once held it as residential-zoned land.
A different mall, "Auburn Mills," was proposed here in 1990 and never built; Great Lakes Crossing rose on the abandoned site.
The mall opened with more than 54,000 shoppers on day one.
It spans about 1.355 million square feet with 170-plus stores, making it the largest outlet mall in Michigan.
GameWorks, one of the original entertainment anchors, closed in 2010 -- the same year the mall added "Outlets" to its name.

Connected places

The Palace of Auburn Hills

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Explore the full web of connections on the map.

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