J.L. Hudson Corporation developed Westland Center, opening July 28, 1965, in what was then Nankin Township, Michigan, designed by Victor Gruen Associates together with Louis G. Redstone Associates as a sister property to Hudson’s existing Eastland Center (Harper Woods) and Northland Center (Southfield) malls. A four-level, 354,000 sqft Hudson’s department store anchored the single-level mall, which incorporated a small mezzanine and lower concourse level in places and fourteen sculptural artworks throughout its courts and concourses, including pieces by George Rickey and Samuel Kashwan.
The mall’s opening had an unusual civic consequence: the city of Livonia had been attempting to annex the Nankin Township land where the mall was being built, and in response, Nankin Township residents voted on May 16, 1966, to incorporate the remaining township as its own city, naming it Westland after the shopping center that had just opened there.
JCPenney joined as a second anchor in 1976, MainStreet as a third in November 1987 (converting to Kohl’s in March 1989), and Sears as a fourth in October 1997; Hudson’s itself became Marshall Field’s in 2001 and Macy’s in 2006. At roughly 1,056,696 sqft, the property has since lost both Macy’s, which closed in March 2017, and Sears, which closed in August 2021 as the last operating Sears store in Michigan, leaving JCPenney and Kohl’s as the property’s two remaining anchors.
Namdar Realty Group currently owns the property, which carries more than 60 inline stores and sits on land the city of Westland has separately targeted for a broader redevelopment project, with site grading and infrastructure work underway as of 2024-2025 toward a targeted September 2025 opening for new walking paths, open space and a performance venue nearby.
That “city named after the mall” origin story, an entire Detroit-suburb municipality choosing its own name in direct response to a shopping center’s arrival and a rival city’s annexation attempt, gives Westland Center a genuinely unique place in American retail history, one that has outlasted the loss of both its original Hudson’s-descended anchor and its later Sears addition while the surrounding city that bears its name continues investing in redevelopment around it.
