from “le détroit” · the strait
The display department at Hudson's planned Christmas for most of the year, and up to 450,000 people a season rode up to Santaland on the 12th floor to see what it built.
The display department at Hudson's had the 15th floor and spent most of the year planning Christmas. Its crew built the mechanical windows and hung 1,500 wreaths. The same crew designed the Thanksgiving parade. All 50 ground-level windows carried the holiday, with marching Santas and mechanical bears behind the glass and carols piped onto the sidewalk.
All of it pointed at 12. At its peak, Santaland on the 12th floor at Hudson's drew up to 450,000 people a season, by DBusiness magazine's count. The store had 51 passenger elevators and 48 escalators to get them there. Hudson's hired about 3,000 extra workers for the holidays on top of more than 7,000 regular staff.
The season started when Santa stepped off the last float of the Thanksgiving parade onto the Hudson's marquee. For generations of Michigan families that was the signal, and the elevators ran parents and children up to the store's decorated toy floor. Some of the people who rode the escalators up to the 12th floor still remember standing in line to see Santa.
Every December the 12th-floor auditorium turned into extra toy department. Toyland ran an indoor carnival with live ponies, a children's restaurant and a shop where only children could buy. Santaland took a different theme every year, with an enchanted forest on the way in, and 30 helpers called Pixies walked each child through it to Santa.
Hudson's also had a Black Santa, which the Detroit Historical Museum calls a first for a major retailer. Families could choose which Santa they saw. One floor up, the Riverview Room on 13 served breakfast with Santa, with a visit from a character named Christmas Carol, a show and games for the whole family.
Every December a tree of lights nine floors tall hung on the Woodward side. It ran 50,000 watts down a store of 25 floors and more than 2.1 million square feet, the world's tallest department store until 1961. Inside, the Yuletide shop on 10 sold ornaments from Germany and Poland. The first floor ran to space-age coil Christmas trees. In 1949 a crowd gathered outside the store to see Santa, with his sleigh and reindeer parked in front of the Christmas display.
The doors shut on January 17, 1983, after years of downsizing, and the building sold in December 1989. On October 24, 1998, 2,728 pounds of explosives brought it down. The implosion went at 5:45 p.m., the store's old closing time. The fall took about 30 seconds and left a pile of rubble 60 feet high.
The Detroit Historical Museum brought the season back as Hudson's Holidays. The exhibit opened in 2021 with Michael Hauser, a former Hudson's employee and the store's historian, as guest curator. It has ended and is no longer on display. The 2025 to 2026 edition filled the Allesee Gallery of Culture with Toy Town, recreated windows and the Santa Bears.
Photo: The closed store from Woodward, 1988, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
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