In the 1950s Hudson’s, on Woodward Avenue, the heart of downtown Detroit, was the second-largest department store in America (after Macy’s in New York). Through the 1960s and 70s, as the city began its long hollowing out, those who had left would drive back into the city at Christmas to shop there and gawp at the window displays and the lights. It was not enough to keep the place going. In early 1983 Hudson’s closed. For the next 16 years the building sat empty, another corner of blight in a blighted city. When it was demolished in 1998, it was the tallest building ever to have been blown up.