Contributor Post: Land of Neon - Target #279, Dearborn, Michigan

The following is a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post.

This post will look at retail in Dearborn, Wayne County, MI.

Target #279

15901 Ford Road, Dearborn, MI

Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 10.2 miles, approx. 16 minutes

This store tour comes to this blog with grateful permission from Reed-Y4123 Explorations of the DeadMalls community on Discord, whose photos I'll be using in this post.

Right in the center of the city of Dearborn, not too far from it's two downtowns, Fairlane Town Center, Ford Motor Company's world headquarters and The Henry Ford, and just a half mile south of the Dearborn-Detroit border, lies this Target store. With all that within reasonable distance, you'd think Target would've applied their sleek, modern and upscale looks of their latest design to this store. Unfortunately, you're wrong. The Dearborn Target is an ultra low volume store - small, no-frills and untouched in 18 years. These facts are quite surprising for it's location! And the interior is pretty cool and quite rare to see in recent days, especially in Michigan!

Target has operated this store since October 7, 1987, as one of the two main anchors of a new strip complex called The Shops at Fairlane Meadows, alongside Mervyn's (then a sister store to Target through the Dayton-Hudson Corporation and now housing a Burlington store). It's trade area includes 80% of Dearborn and a large swath of Detroit north to roughly Fenkell Street and east to part of Detroit's east side. When it opened in 1987, it's trade area was much larger - extending north to Oak Park and the southeast corner of Southfield, south to Melvindale and the southernmost sections of Detroit, and west to the Dearborn Heights-Inkster border. This trade area has shrunken with additional store openings in later years.

The 1987 opening dates this store back to Target's start in Michigan. Although Hudson's, which had several stores across Michigan (most of which are obviously now Macy's stores), was too owned by the Dayton-Hudson Corporation (and of course reflected in the corporate name), the company waited until 1987 to begin opening it's Target subsidiary in the Great Lakes State. Target's October 7, 1987 openings included a batch of stores in and near Detroit to introduce the brand into the state. The batch included 6 locations: T-278 at Hall and Schoenherr in Shelby Township, this store, T-279 in Dearborn, T-280 in Taylor, T-281 in Westland, T-283 on 8 Mile east of Van Dyke in Detroit and T-284 in Waterford Township. Out of these 6 stores, four of them are still around (Shelby Township, Taylor, Westland and this store), but out of these four, this one is clearly the most neglected.

This Target has only ever received one remodel, a complete exterior and interior refresh in 2001. Prior to that, the exterior would've looked like this, and the interior would've looked like this. I'm sure most of you came to this post to see this store's outdated interior, so we better head inside (these photos are sorted in a different order than the order of when Y4123 took them), but don't forget to take this directory with you...

As you step through the front doors, the first thing that you'll see straight ahead of you is an ultra tiny Bullseye's Playground section. Look to your right and you'll find the Pizza Hut, the only part of this store with yellow neon. The color scheme and design was changed in the 2001 remodel, but the cafe's location and layout is likely original to this store. This is the only food counter this store has, as it doesn't have a Starbucks like many modern Target stores have.

Turning left, let's head past the cart stall and past the checkouts for a look at the reason why Y4123 came to this store and why you came to this post - Target's P01 decor! While there are still a decent number of Target stores with this decor floating around the country, Target's current aggressive remodeling campaign has eliminated many remaining classic 1990's and early 2000's Target interior stores. Presently, only three examples of pre-P04 (Target's first decor to incorporate red walls and white neon) stores exist in the state of Michigan: this store, the store at Port Huron's Birchwood Mall, which also has P01, and the store in Battle Creek, which too has P01. P01 goodness intensifies starting with this photo:

Our first department is the grocery department. This store's grocery department is tucked between the checkouts and cosmetics, and is rather small. I'm not making this up either. Target only really began pushing for larger grocery selections with P04, and it wasn't until the debut of PFresh during the P09 era that Target really began stepping up their grocery game. This section of the store is part of the green "color world", and features green overhead department signage and matching green neon. As this store's trade area includes large Hispanic-American and Arab-American populations, it's surprising that there's a lack of Spanish-language and/or Arabic-language signage in this store.

Just a bit down the front actionway, across from cosmetics, we find the home office department.

Next to home office is the media department. This store still has a rather sizeable selection of CDs and DVDs, two things whose selections were significantly reduced in Target's recent remodels.

Across the front actionway from the media department is health & beauty and the pharmacy counter. In the conversion of this store's pharmacy into a CVS, all the neon that was placed over the pharmacy counter was ripped out, and the wall painted red to conform to CVS' design.

And next to the pharmacy is the store's electronics department, located in the front left corner of the building. Having electronics in this section of the sales floor is a classic Target trait, as subsequent remodels would place electronics in the back center section of the store. It is also in this photo that we really get a glimpse of the green neon.

Closeup of the electronics department desk and some more of the green neon.

Leaving electronics, the next department we encounter is automotive.

Adjacent to automotive is hardware. This also provides us with a look at the P01 decor's aisle marker design. The different color worlds had aisle markers to correspond to their color world. The green variant is shown here, while other sections of the store would have had the red and blue variants before being changed out for P09 aisle markers (as you'll see a bit later). The red variant of these aisle markers would later be carried over into the P04 decor.

Enjoy some more of the green neon as we look down the left wall back towards electronics.

As we reach the back actionway, we enter the red world. The red world is rather small compared to the blue and green worlds, consisting only of pet supplies, toys, home storage, cleaning supplies and sporting goods. You'll have to look carefully right above one of the shelves to see the red neon.

From the red world, we shift over to the center actionway and into the blue world and housewares. The blue world spans the center of the store and the right part of the store.

Here's the final interior shot from Y4123, showing men's clothing and a great glimpse of the blue neon. In the background are the fitting rooms, with blue walls and a location that's original to this store.

And this wraps up our tour of Dearborn's P01 Target. Visiting this store will bring you back in time to another era of Target, and this store is definitely worth checking out if you happen to be in the area. I so far haven't yet heard of any plans for this store to receive a remodel, so P01 lives on in Michigan for a little while longer.

And that's all we have today. Until next time....