Southeast Michigan Retail: Motor City Retail History

  This post will look at retail in Southgate, Wayne County, MI.   Children's Bargain Town USA / Toys "R" Us #9262 / Big Lots #4723 14333 Eureka Road, Southgate, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 15 miles, approx. 22 minutes   You've seen Big Lots' previous Southgate location , and today, we're taking you to their new home, but first, our usual building history. In 1969, Children's Bargain Town USA opened this store as part of a large push into the Detroit market, although their tenancy here wound up becoming short-lived, as in 1971 the chain was acquired by Toys "R" Us and rebranded under their name not long after. Toys "R" Us remodeled the building twice - first in the early 1980s into their brown roof prototype, and again in the early 1990s into their rainbow entrance prototype, ensuring that the store would last all the way through to the chain's 2018 demise from their bankruptcy. Other than housing Halloween s...

The following is (mostly) a SMR:MCRH Contributor Post.   This post will look at retail in Southgate, Wayne County, MI.   Kroger Michigan Division #524 / Family Foodland #5524 / Big Lots #1425 14155 Eureka Road, Southgate, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 15.1 miles, approx. 22 minutes This Kroger store originally opened in 1981 as the second Kroger-bannered grocery store to operate within the city of Southgate, and the first of two greenhouse-styled Kroger stores to open in the Downriver suburbs that year. A concrete wall separating the back of the property from adjacent homes on Balsam and Nancy Streets abruptly exploded on June 14, 1984 , and almost a month later, it was announced that the store would close on July 21, 1984 , along with 69 other southeastern Michigan Kroger stores, due to a protracted labor strike. It should be noted that the mid-1980s were a rough period for Kroger regarding labor disputes. Elsewhere in the country, the chain closed a...

This post will look at retail in Southgate, Wayne County, MI. Michaels #1404 14501 Eureka Road, Southgate, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 15 miles, approx. 23 minutes I was long overdue to add material to this blog, but I was just too busy over the past couple months. Getting back to this post, this building has a very interesting history, dating back to 1965, when it opened as Art Van Furniture's first Downriver store, only to move out in 1978 (it disappears from newspapers after April of that year) when Art Van opened a larger store a few miles up Eureka Road in Taylor. This wasn't the end of its furniture store-hosting life, however, as two local furniture stores would subsequently open in this spot: Comet Furniture opened shortly after Art Van left, was replaced by Apartment Furniture Rental in 1981, and closed in 1984. The building, however, wouldn't sit vacant for long, as a Highland Superstore opened in 1985. This store would only last a few...

This post will look at retail in Southgate, Wayne County, MI. Previously on Southeast Michigan Retail, we visited a red-roof Pizza Hut that was still in business . If you want the detailed history of said store, visit the linked prequel blog post. Two years after that visit, SMR finally shows you the current condition of this store, now closed. With the reopening of a lot more of the state of Michigan occurring since I first wrote the previous post, it has become the assumption that there will be no official replacement for this store, and that a delivery/carryout location in Woodhaven has become the de-facto replacement. Red-roof Pizza Huts in Lincoln Park and Clawson, both also owned by Redberry Restaurant Brands (who seems to be the franchise for virtually every Pizza Hut in Metro Detroit) have also been shuttered during the pandemic. And now let's get to the picture part. Both of these photos were taken a little over two months after the store's permanent closu...

This post will look at retail in Southgate, Wayne County, MI. This is the first time we've featured a restaurant on Southeast Michigan Retail. We'll appropriately start off our restaurant posts with a dying breed which is ever inching closer to extinction, and the latest local fatality from this movement.  Former Pizza Hut #26284/#407034 14550 Fort Street, Southgate, MI Driving distance and time from downtown Detroit: 15.4 miles, approx. 20 minutes This Pizza Hut opened in 1976, built in the chain's all-too-familiar red roof design, or if you want more technical stuff, built in the Series 35 prototype of the red roof design. Now do note that all photos in this post were taken in the summer of 2018, I just wanted to point that out since, as you'll read below, you won't be able to get any pizza from this address, as it has, of course, fallen victim to Pizza Hut's aggressive shutdowns of their dine-in red roof locations in favor of delivery/c...