Headless mannequins and piles of fur coats can be found in one room. Another contains furniture and a Santa Claus statuette. Other rooms are locked behind metal doors and might never be opened again. A film crew used the gritty surroundings late last year to shoot action scenes for a movie.Ī 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. "It's like a labyrinth."Ĭut off from power and heat, the dark passageways are currently navigable only by flashlight and have a post-apocalyptic look and feel. "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. The tunnels emerge at two large garage doors at opposite ends of the mall. The entire network runs several miles and includes an astounding 484 rooms, said Jerry Witkowski, a former code enforcement official for Southfield. 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 tunnel network begins with a winding roadway that branches off into passageways connecting subterranean rooms, decrepit stairwells and non-working elevator shafts. 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.
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.
Watch Video: Inside the tunnels under Northland mallĬountless shoppers visited metro Detroit's Northland Center mall during its 61 years of business.
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