#thankyouforcallingTicketmasterchargebyphonewhereAmericanExpressisthepreferredmethodofpayment

[steamedtangerine]

from Detroit Monthly December 1990

Harmony House was a chain of record stores in SE Michigan It was one of the few that still offered actual records when many other stores and chains strayed from that older medium. It also doubled as a Ticketmaster ticket sales outlet (They allowed cash, though lines were out the door on on-sale days, and they never told the customer what seating they got until all was committed-they provided a map though of the seating as an afterthought. If one ordered their tickets as charge by phone, you were told the exact seating offered before the purchase was completed but no map of seating was ever provided to the phone sales agents to explain where exactly that was.)

There were Harmony Houses in choice locations (including one in the RenCen buiding) , and a few of my friends worked at a few locations.They were quite good at ordering rare items.

 Harmony House lasted until the early 2000s.

[steamedtangerine]

From Detroit Monthly 1988

Southfield-aka. Concrete City- the nearest suburb to Detroit with skyscrapers. Though places like Lathrup Village, Oak Park, Bingham Farms (where Ticketmaster charge-by-phone was located), and Beverly Hills exist, they are still considered part of the greater Southfield Township.

Northland used to be the bomb in the 80s. It had a good bookstore (I could find Paul Kirchner’s The Bus there). The Northland Hudson’s had a great book department along with a great electronics/music section and a little niche for goofy knickknacks (Spitting Image puppets, banana-pens and Various Rubik’s Cube-esque puzzles).

The Tel-12 was an enclosed mall not far from a decent Toys R’ Us. I think it had a Crowley’s and a Montgomery Wards as anchor stores. The food court had a banging arcade with games like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. At one entrance was a small party store-tobacconist shop-news/magazine stand which was one of only two places I saw carry the Creepshow comic book (along with a Perry’s-or was it a Revco-not far from my neighborhood). The mall had a Harmony House with a Ticketmaster ticket provider, so the line for tickets (as I found with seeing Alice Cooper) went out the door and down the main mall corridor. There is now a decent Meijer’s down the way from where one of the mall entrances was. That mall was the first place I saw an expansive LEGO exhibit of replicas of US landmarks and buildings.

Though many pictures are available online of the Northland Mall (especially on Flickr and especially when folks descended on that place with cameras blazing the week it was shutting down), Tel-Twelve is almost nonexistent except one archived 80s pic of a Madonna look-al-like contest and those few stray pics I posted last winter of the Southfield-Lathrup HS Marching band.