SPEAKER_03: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hello, beautiful nerds. This week, we're rebroadcasting one of my favorite episodes of the last few years about Sears homes. I liked it so much that I put it as a piece of bonus content on the audio version of the book that Kurt and I wrote last year. Speaking of our first book, the 99% Invisible City came out one year ago this week. It peaked at number three on The New York Times bestseller list. And we were really excited about that. If you're into the show at all, I think you'll love the book. It's also a good gift for folks who are not into podcasts yet, but like this kind of nerdy stuff. And if you're an audiobook person, you can listen to me read it to you for ten and a half hours, which people seem to dig. We're on our semi-annual retreat this week where we look back at all the episodes we've made and how we want to shape the show in the future. So thank you for affording us this time to do that. We have a barn burner of a new episode next week. It's all about a flag. So we'll be right back in our wheelhouse in no time. In the meantime, please enjoy this story for the first time or even listen again. It is worth it listening again. Thanks.
SPEAKER_06: It's from 1908. Catalog number 177 of The Great Pricemaker.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, there's so much stuff.
SPEAKER_00: The Sears and Roebuck mail order catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th century American life. In 1908, when this particular issue came out, one out of every five Americans were already subscribers.
SPEAKER_08: So is this kind of like the Amazon warehouse before the Amazon warehouse? Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Anyone, anywhere in the country could order this catalog for free, look through it, and then have anything their heart desired delivered directly to their doorstep. Like seriously, anything. Parasols and pipes.
SPEAKER_02: Really fancy looking belts. Ostrich feathers. The world's best. Ostrich feathers.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, headstones.
SPEAKER_03: At its height, the Sears catalog offered over 100,000 items on 1,400 pages. It weighed four pounds.
SPEAKER_00: Today, those 1,400 pages provide us with a snapshot of American life in the first decade of the 20th century.
SPEAKER_02: 1596, our new Williams special single strap buggy harness. What?
SPEAKER_06: Wait, what is it? It's a sheep shearing machine. Menstruation products have definitely evolved.
SPEAKER_03: The Sears catalog tells the tale of a world itemized. But starting with this very issue, in 1908, the company that offered America everything began offering what just might be the most audacious and in some ways most necessary item of all.
SPEAKER_05: And... Wait, these are houses.
SPEAKER_03: On page 596, Sears subscribers would come across a drawing of a house. Two stories, nine rooms, gabled roofs, and a price. $1,700.
SPEAKER_08: Wait, $1,700 for... no.
SPEAKER_02: I think the whole... For the house? Yeah. From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Home Program offered complete full-size mail order houses to the would-be homeowner, what would come to be called kit homes. Sears actually provided an entirely separate catalog for these kit homes, featuring dozens of different designs.
SPEAKER_00: All you had to do was select your preferred model from the catalog, fill out the provided form, send in a check, and a few weeks later, everything you'd need would arrive in a train car.
SPEAKER_03: Its door was secured with a small red wax seal, just like the seal on the back of a letter to the king or something. It was to be broken only by you. You throw open the door to this boxcar and you're looking at 12,000 pieces of framing lumber and 20,000 Sears shakes.
SPEAKER_05: That's Rosemary Thornton, an architectural historian and the author of The Houses That Sears Built.
SPEAKER_00: She says that that train car also came with every single door, every single doorknob, a fold-away ironing board for your kitchen, even the mantle for the fireplace. And then you would begin the process of dutifully loading it either onto your mule and cart or your Model T.
SPEAKER_00: The lumber came pre-cut, kind of like a giant Ikea set, along with, in true Ikea style, an instruction booklet. If you provided the foundation, Sears promised that working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, you could finish your Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days. Although Rosemary says those instructions also came with a warning.
SPEAKER_05: Do not accept anyone's advice on how this house should be built. Follow this instruction manual and do not deviate. So if the old wizened carpenter comes by and says, I wouldn't build it that way, and Sears is warning you up front, do not listen to that man.
SPEAKER_03: Sears would go on to ship out some 75,000 homes across the country. In doing so, they helped replace the idea that each new house needed to be built from scratch with the promise that new homes could be standardized, affordable, and within reach of every family. Long before the advent of housing developments in the modern suburb, it was the Sears kit home that gave Americans their first taste of 20th century domestic life. But it's also a chapter of housing history that was almost lost.
SPEAKER_00: Sears was not the first company to offer kit homes, nor even the first mail-order catalog. But it came to dominate mail-order because its founder, Richard Sears, was that thing that so many people would claim to be over the course of the 20th century. But very few actually were. He was a marketing genius.
SPEAKER_05: He just did so many things. And one of my favorites is that Sears knew that most farm households would have both the Montgomery Ward and the Sears Roebuck catalog in the household. So he purposefully made his catalog just a little bit less wide and a little bit less tall than the Montgomery Ward catalog, knowing that when the farmhouse wife was tidying things up, she would naturally put the Sears Roebuck catalog on top of the Montgomery Ward catalog. I love that.
SPEAKER_00: By 1907, Sears and Roebuck was selling the then equivalent of $1.3 billion of merchandise to American families every year. And it's around this time that Richard Sears saw a way to sell even more. Most American families were still living in multi-generational housing.
SPEAKER_03: The reigning paradigm of the middle class was the Victorian home with its many little rooms divvying up children, uncles, and grandparents. Sears looked at this idyllic scene of families living in harmony and saw a wasted opportunity. Why should newlyweds move into old homes with old things when they can move into new homes and fill them with new things from Sears? And thus, the Sears Modern Home Program was born.
SPEAKER_00: And it was a hit, particularly after the end of World War I, when the influx of returning veterans triggered a need for more housing. And there's literature that said if you really love this country, if you really want to do right by America, buy a house, build a house.
SPEAKER_05: And that's when the hit homes really took off.
SPEAKER_00: Sears cut the lumber for almost all of these homes, ready to order, in giant mills situated across the country. The largest, in Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, covered nearly 40 acres. And the sheer variety of homes it shipped out was staggering. That first Modern Homes catalog had over 40 models to choose from. But Sears would go on to offer 447 different designs.
SPEAKER_03: Every house in the catalog had a name befitting its architectural aspirations. So if you always dreamed of living in a California Mission-style home, but you couldn't actually move to California, you might consider purchasing Sears' Alhambra model. Other styles included the Craftsman-style Winona and the Dutch colonial Martha Washington. They range from everything from what I would call a hunter's cabin, literally a two-room house for $200 or $300, to the Sears Magnolia, which was 2,900 square feet,
SPEAKER_05: two full bathrooms upstairs, a half bathroom downstairs, two full fireplaces, a den. It even had servants' quarters and a servants' private bath. Sears even offered a six-classroom schoolhouse, complete with an auditorium and library.
SPEAKER_00: But mostly, it was homes.
SPEAKER_03: Big, beautiful, empty homes, just waiting to be filled with things. In fact, if you look at some of the old floor plans, it'll feature the living room, the dining room, the bedrooms, but then it will say,
SPEAKER_05: place for a graphophone, spot for a piano, place for two Tufton chairs. And so he was kind of showing people how to stuff their houses with stuff from the Sears robot catalog.
SPEAKER_00: And consumers obliged. There are tales of first-time homeowners who bought what you might call a turnkey operation from the catalog. The house, the furniture, and the many little things that rested on the furniture. A whole new life, all from Sears.
SPEAKER_03: In part because the company used its considerable marketing savvy to make it clear that building your house was going to be easy. With a pre-designed home, you didn't need an architect. And with the pre-cut lumber frame, you didn't need a carpenter either. You could treat it like any other consumer item. Sears even had this ad in the front of the catalog. It showed two Rodessa models, one of Sears' most popular houses being built side by side.
SPEAKER_00: One was built from scratch, essentially, using ordinary building materials and uncut stick lumber. The other with pre-cut lumber. In the ad, the house with the stick lumber sits unfinished. People are collapsed in the front yard, exhausted.
SPEAKER_03: And then the house where it was built with the pre-cut lumber, they're sitting on the porch with a mint julep, you know, having just the time of their life.
SPEAKER_00: And so although many people did hire a contractor to build their Sears home, many did not. And I have heard many stories about families receiving their kit home and calling on neighbors to help them come out and start the process of building the house.
SPEAKER_05: For many families, these were their first homes with things like central heating and insulation.
SPEAKER_00: In some neighborhoods, a Sears kit home might be the only house on the block with electricity.
SPEAKER_03: And in 1911, Sears began offering competitive mortgages to their customers, which also helped people in neighborhoods of color get around the practice of redlining. And redlining just meant that the bankers and the mortgage lenders would draw a line around neighborhoods where they would not loan money.
SPEAKER_05: So Sears didn't do any of that. And that enabled immigrants, men and women of color, and single women who would otherwise never have a chance of becoming a homeowner to have indoor plumbing for the first time. But then the company discovered that it had made a mistake, one that will probably sound all too familiar.
SPEAKER_00: From the beginning, Sears had made sure their mortgage policy was like everything else in their catalog, obtainable.
SPEAKER_03: The application form was only half a page long and almost everyone who applied for a mortgage qualified, meaning that the average Sears homeowner was also in debt to Sears. In the roaring 20s, when interest rates were low and liquidity high, it wasn't a problem. But when the Great Depression hit, things got ugly fast. The company ended up foreclosing on tens of thousands of its very own customers.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it was an emotional devastation. We all know the Great Depression was horrible for so many reasons, but losing a home that you had built with your own two hands just seems like such a twist of the knife.
SPEAKER_00: For Sears, it was a PR disaster. Rosemary remembers talking to someone in 2003 who described how Sears had foreclosed on their grandparents' home in 1931, the very same home Sears had sold them a decade earlier.
SPEAKER_05: And he said, for two generations, our family never patronized Sears ever again. I mean, those are strong feelings to go from 1931 to 2003. After years of declining sales, Sears would finally close its modern homes department in 1940.
SPEAKER_03: A few other kit home manufacturers, ones that hadn't sold mortgages, they survived. But the Sears kit home boom was over. Then came World War II, and with it, the next modern housing boom, featuring the rise of the suburbs and the prefab home, the homes so many of us live in today.
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, most of the Sears homes, the Alhambra's, the Argyll's, the Magnolias, they ended up being sold to new owners who didn't know what they bought or didn't care to know. Despite the high quality of the materials, over the decades as the company became associated with convenience over and above quality, no one wanted to admit that they lived in a home that came from the Sears catalog. It was embarrassing. So a lot of them ended up being renovated beyond recognition. Many were torn down. Others were simply abandoned. And as for where to find the ones that remain?
SPEAKER_05: Unfortunately, after World War II, during a corporate house cleaning, the sales records were destroyed. So these records are, the records are missing.
SPEAKER_00: Records are gone chief. We don't know, they're not just missing, they're gone. They're gone. They're in somebody's burn pile. All that stuff was disposed of.
SPEAKER_05: So the only way to find these houses today is literally one by one. A few weeks after I interviewed Rosemary, I went to see some of the last remaining Sears homes outside of Caro, Illinois, a town where Sears largest mill had once stood.
SPEAKER_00: When I got there, the only sign that there had ever been anything there was the name of an overgrown back road, Sears, leading to two tiny houses, two Sears-Rodesa models sitting next to each other. They were the twin Rhodesa models from that original advertisement, with the two homes being built, one fast, one slow, side by side. Now they were in so-so shape, but somehow they'd outlived the mill that built them here on Sears-Robuck Road. I stopped to take a look, and 30 seconds later, a man waved me inside.
SPEAKER_04: Cut up! Cut up! Cut up! Freeze! No! No! Go to your room. They're just noisy, they don't mean no, they, they try to scare you off I think.
SPEAKER_00: Guy Parks greeted me wearing an old mechanic's jumpsuit. As he settled into an easy chair in the living room, he told me that he'd lived on and off in Caro since the 1950s, and that he first laid eyes on this Rhodesa nearly 35 years ago.
SPEAKER_04: And the house was derelict. I mean, it was, the roof was leaking, the windows were broke out, it was still safe, but it was old.
SPEAKER_00: Guy ran into the owner a little while later, and the owner said to him, how about I sell you the place, and you fix it up? I said, oh hell, I can't buy nothing. I ain't saved a dollar out of my last check.
SPEAKER_04: He said, well I'll make it where you can buy it. He said, fifteen, I'll sell it to you for fifteen. I thought he meant thousands, I said, man, I wouldn't give that far if it was up in shape. He said, I'm talking about hundreds. I said, you wait right here. So Guy went out, came back an hour later with the cash, and bought the Rhodesa for $1500 on the spot.
SPEAKER_03: Eventually he'd buy the Rhodesa next to it too, the twin. His son lives there now.
SPEAKER_04: And I hate to say this, but I'm dumb enough that I spent everything I made for the next five, six years on this place, trying to make it right. Did you know that it was a Sears, a Sears, a catwalk home?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I knew all these were Sears homes, because the man that lived down on the corner, he worked for Sears.
SPEAKER_04: Did he tell you any stories about the men?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah. But he always told me the bad stuff.
SPEAKER_04: Guy's neighbor told him that a job at the mill had been hard, dangerous work.
SPEAKER_00: As with a lot of mills in the area, it wasn't uncommon to see employees missing fingers. When the Sears Modern Home Department closed, the workers purchased the plant and switched to making crates for bombers during World War II. After that, they tried making their own kit homes under a new name, but ultimately they couldn't hold on. The mill closed in 1955. They didn't make very many homes after that.
SPEAKER_04: I think this one down on the end, the little yellow house, was probably the last one they built. And it was just a little shotgun house. My wife's sister lived there until she died. Even Guy's house isn't very Sears anymore.
SPEAKER_03: He's replaced a lot of the original parts over the years. See that front door? The only thing in this house, in this room right here, that's original, was that front door.
SPEAKER_04: Sears door. Before a series of race riots gutted downtown Caro in the 1960s, the town had nearly a hundred other Sears homes.
SPEAKER_00: Now maybe only a third of them are left. Guy watched as the rest were abandoned or reduced to rubble. And the downtown just kept going down, going down, going down.
SPEAKER_04: You could see every month or so there'd be another business gone. Finally there was nothing down there but derelict buildings that's falling down. And since then all that's gone. It's all gone. Nothing the same. For a long time, Guy Parks' little Rhodessa and its twin were just two of a small handful of Sears homes that had been located and identified.
SPEAKER_03: When Guy bought his house, of the 75,000 kit homes that Sears built and shipped, maybe 5% had been properly documented. Most sat undiscovered. If you lived in a Sears house, chances are you didn't even know it.
SPEAKER_00: But a little over 20 years ago, one woman took a big step towards changing that. Although, as she herself would be the first to admit, she didn't really mean to.
SPEAKER_06: It's pure serendipity that I ended up in this field.
SPEAKER_00: This is Rebecca Hunter. And no, she doesn't live in a Sears home. But she does live in a town on the other end of Illinois, a little west of Chicago on the Fox River. It's called Elgin.
SPEAKER_03: And unlike Caro, Elgin was not known for Sears homes. When Rebecca first got there in the mid-90s, almost no one there, herself included, knew what a Sears house was.
SPEAKER_06: Then my partner died in 1995 and I was doing everything because it helped.
SPEAKER_00: And that's how Rebecca ended up at the local library, where she happened upon a book about Sears homes, which contained old catalog images of the various models. Which would mean nothing, except that one bitterly cold day in February, 1997. That book happened to be lying on the dining room table.
SPEAKER_06: And I picked it up and I said, oh, haha, I wonder if I could walk around my neighborhood and find one of these houses. That would be really funny. And so I picked up the book and I set about walking in my neighborhood. How many were you realistically expecting to find?
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't expecting to find any. It was really kind of fun.
SPEAKER_06: You know, I had a goal, I had a mission and I forgot about the cold. And then after, oh, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes.
SPEAKER_06: I was walking down Plum Street and I saw this house and I instantly knew it was a Sears.
SPEAKER_00: Right there, after almost zero effort, boom, a Sears house. Rebecca looks at the house, looks at the book, looks at the house, looks at the book. And it's a match. Craftsman style, tapered porch columns, the Avalon model.
SPEAKER_06: Then I said, huh, I wonder if I could walk around my neighborhood and find another one. And so I did.
SPEAKER_03: On walk after walk, Rebecca kept finding Sears models. The Mitchell, the Crescent, the Volonia.
SPEAKER_06: Then there was the Betsy Ross, the Osborne and the Alhambra.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, there's one street that has the sunlight model on one side of the street and the opposite is the starlight.
SPEAKER_06: So you have a sunlight and a starlight right across the street from each other. But Rebecca wanted to confirm that these were Sears homes.
SPEAKER_00: So she sent a mailer out asking each resident to go and inspect the basement.
SPEAKER_03: When they did, most discovered beams bearing a special stamp with a part number from Sears. Others found shipping labels from Sears on the back of attic baseboards. Still others managed to find their homes original Sears blueprints. And Rebecca's not even done. There are still more houses waiting to be investigated. What are the total number of houses in Elgin, MVP?
SPEAKER_06: At the moment, I think we are at 237 Sears houses and about 100 from other companies. What's more, most of the homes Rebecca found looked like they were straight out of the catalog.
SPEAKER_00: They had barely been altered since the 1920s. That's why she was able to find so many. Because the homes could still be recognized. And there was a specific reason why. When the Elgin watch factory, which had employed a quarter of the town, closed in 1964,
SPEAKER_03: Elgin entered a localized recession, sparing it from the renovation craze of the 60s and 70s. Instead, Elgin Sears homes simply sat there through the decades untouched. Does anyone ever point out the fact that the closing of the watch factory froze the houses in time?
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, we talk about that. We love it. We love it.
SPEAKER_00: Rebecca's study of the Elgin homes, along with the work of other researchers like Rose Thornton, our architectural historian, would help to launch what has become a Sears house hunting movement. People whose chief passion in life is to scour the land, trying to find as many kid homes as possible. Including Rose. Some people do crossword puzzles and some people do jigsaw puzzles. I guess I look for Sears homes.
SPEAKER_05: Well actually, me and Rose and Dale and Wendy and Andrew and Nigel and Cindy look for Sears houses.
SPEAKER_03: Those names form part of an elite core of the Sears house hunters. An A-team, if you will. And like any proper A-team, each member has their specialty. Rosemary hunts for the rare Sears Magnolia, the three story colonial mansion. So far, she says, they've found ten. Dale Wolke specializes in kid homes built by Sears' biggest competitor, the Aladdin Company.
SPEAKER_00: And Andrew Much is the numbers guy. He's currently working with about half a dozen people on a database that would list every single Sears. Meanwhile, Nigel Tate, at 19, is the youngest member of their team.
SPEAKER_03: He's found over 1,000 kid homes without even leaving his desk. He uses Google Street View. But mostly, they hunt for houses the old-fashioned way. Chasing down clues and patrolling the mean streets of America. In a car. Together.
SPEAKER_00: And Andrew's up in front and he's got his computer and he's writing down addresses.
SPEAKER_06: And Dale is driving and Wendy and I are in the back seat, each with a camera. And everybody's looking out the window and somebody says, hey, what's that over there on the right? Although, let's face it, they're not exactly bounty hunters.
SPEAKER_05: And so I'm getting out and I'm taking pictures and this very large, angry man bursts out the front door. He has a baseball bat in his hand. We get in the car and we take off.
SPEAKER_00: The occasional misstep aside, Rose and Rebecca think that they and other house hunters have helped identify nearly 50,000 kid homes from Sears and other companies.
SPEAKER_03: So the next time a ragtag team of researchers armed with cameras, laptops and an old Sears catalog knocks on your door and asks if they can take a quick tour of your basement. Don't be frightened. They're there to help. And who knows? You might even be standing in an undiscovered model.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen a Sears schoolhouse? Because I saw that they offered that one year. Oh, yeah. I've been looking for that a long time. Good Lord. I've been hunting that thing down like it's my job.
SPEAKER_03: Sears homes aren't the only Sears architecture dotting the landscape. Kurt and I talk about the adaptive reuse of massive Sears buildings all across the U.S. after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRS to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRS steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluver technology, 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet. The perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears on your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3M screens dot com slash brighter to get your new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3M screens dot com slash brighter.
SPEAKER_03: This show is sponsored by better help. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking, your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that. So you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with better help. Visit better help dot com slash invisible today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's better help. H e l p dot com slash invisible. Years before Kirk Colestead joined the team at 99 percent invisible, he and I started corresponding by email. Among other things, he sometimes sent over story ideas, and one of those was about an old Sears building he moved into in Minneapolis. It's not a Sears home. It's a Sears plant, a huge city block sized warehouse distribution center and retail store. Yeah. And when I was really young, I used to actually go shopping in this thing. It was this 12 story art deco Sears. I'd go there with my parents. But for most of my years in Minnesota, it was just an abandoned building.
SPEAKER_02: I used to bike for miles along this overgrown railroad track that ran past the building in a trench. And at the time, that big complex was kind of this ominous presence that you just kind of slip past on your bike and not get too close to. So you basically don't engage with it at all. It's not really something like you go up to. You just cycle past it quickly.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's just, you know, and it took multiple city blocks. So it was really kind of between the parking lot and the building. It was just this big, empty presence in the city.
SPEAKER_02: And then suddenly, you know, I moved back to the Midwest years later, and this place is totally transformed. It had been renamed the Midtown Exchange, and it was full of all these little shops and eateries on the main floor, plus offices and apartments and condos above. And those old rail tracks that I'd biked along had been cleared and paved and turned into this five mile greenway, which was really neat. It's sort of this ready made rails to trails conversion. And I got really interested in this, not just as a building, but also as an urban phenomenon, right? Like how they had turned this nothing into a something again. So I naturally, being an architecture geek, started digging into the history of Sears. So what did you find in your research?
SPEAKER_03: Well, for starters, Richard Warren Sears himself was born in Minnesota, where he actually started selling watches in the late 1800s. Then over time, he moved operations to Chicago and started growing out this larger mail order business.
SPEAKER_02: And it basically became the Amazon of the early 20th century. And in the 1920s, they started branching out even more, adding retail outlets to their distribution centers all the way from, you know, Boston to Seattle. And you've shown me pictures of these. They all look surprisingly similar, even though they're like scattered across the entire US. They have some different brick styles, but they're all kind of boxy, they have big windows and other details in common, including these really great, distinctive Art Deco style towers.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. They look a little bit like castle towers or something. And they're a big giveaway if you're, you know, hunting these kinds of Sears buildings.
SPEAKER_02: And they served a function too. They basically concealed these huge water cisterns that then serve the floors below. And yeah, once you know, you know, the towers and these other details, you can really easily start to spot other towers in other cities. And a lot of that commonality traces back to this one architect in particular, George Kroll Nimminz. And he did a lot of work for Sears. You know, he even designed at one point a mansion for the company's president, but he's mostly known for his big scale commercial work. And among other things, he worked on this really big early plant and administrative hub for Sears in Chicago.
SPEAKER_03: But this is not the Sears Tower of Chicago or the now Willis Tower. It's something else. Right. Right. That actually came many decades later. But amazingly, it was only like half again as big as this really old complex that, you know, nobody really knows about.
SPEAKER_02: The old complex was built a bit west of downtown and it was about 3 million square feet. The company boasted that it was the largest commercial complex in the world at the time. And it spanned multiple blocks. It covered existing streets. So it actually blocked off city streets. And they had to get special permission, of course, from the city to do that. And the place basically functioned like a city within the city. It had its own power plant. It had its own corporate, you know, employee based fire department. And it even had its own radio station, WLS, short for World's Largest Store.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I love that it had its own commercial radio station. That's so great. Yeah. I mean, they got sick of basically buying airtime on other radio stations. And eventually they were like, hey, you know what? We'll just start our own radio station.
SPEAKER_02: Of course. Because, you know, at the time Sears is this giant. It's America's biggest retailer. And they just kept expanding too. They kept following kind of where the country took them. At first they did mail order where they served rural populations. Then they added these mixed use plants with retail outlets to serve cities. And then as people moved out to the suburbs, you know, they began to go into these shopping centers. Right. And today, obviously, Sears is not doing quite as well. And a lot of that complex in Chicago, for example, has been torn down. But some parts are still around. And some have even been reused, including that central iconic tower. Because it's really hard to reuse a million plus square feet inside of a city.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's incredibly difficult and almost impossible to find a single corporate client who could take that on.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So like the one in Minneapolis, for instance, it had to bring in all these different stakeholders, you know, a local hospital and get the city on board and other developers so that, you know, there was a plan to make it mixed use from the start. But these buildings also have some advantages too for adaptive reuse. You know, they're built of sturdy concrete and masonry. And they get a lot of light in on all sides because they have these huge windows.
SPEAKER_03: And so when you wrote me years and years and years ago, it was in part a story about how cities are reusing these Sears buildings. Yeah. And that's what really fascinates me the most. It's not just, you know, that they're being reused, but it's the stories that they tell about the different cities they're being reused in.
SPEAKER_02: So in some ways, it's like this big urban experiment. You know, if you put these different boxes that all look kind of the same and are all, you know, sort of similar in size, and you spread them out across the country and you abandon them, you know, what happens? Right. And it turns out that you get these very city specific stories of abandonment and reuse that tell you something about these different places. Yeah. Okay. So what are some of your favorites? What did you discover?
SPEAKER_03: Well, in Seattle, famous for its coffee, there's an old plant south of downtown that's been transformed into the headquarters of Starbucks.
SPEAKER_02: And the Los Angeles plant is being renovated right now, but for a long time, it was basically down to just the retail store on the ground floor and the rest of the building was empty. But of course, even, you know, an empty building, when you're talking about Hollywood, has a function. You know, you can rent it out for filming. Right. So it became a filming location. And then a lot of cities sort of followed the Minneapolis example. And Boston was the first one to do it where they just said, you know, we have to bring in a bunch of different programs to make this work for our city. So they, you know, had theaters and sports complexes and daycare centers and Memphis and Minneapolis and other cities followed suit. And so there's a little Sears building in Uptown, Oakland, what we call Uptown.
SPEAKER_03: If you drive up Telegraph or away from beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Towards beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. Exactly. You'll see a little one. And what did they use that one for? So that place is really small and it's called the Telegraph Lofts and basically they're live work units.
SPEAKER_02: So they're residential units and there's some self storage and other stuff, but mainly it's residential. Right. Which is probably the thing we need the most in the Bay Area.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. Yeah. If there's, if there are empty buildings to be reused here, I would hope we could just turn them all into more housing.
SPEAKER_02: Amen. All right. Thanks, Kurt. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: 99% of what was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg and Kurt Kohlstedt, mixed in 2018 by Sharif Yousif, music by our director of sound, Swan Riehl. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. The rest of the team includes Vivian Lay, Lasha Madon, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. In this story, you also heard the voices of past 99PI producers Avery Truffleman and Katie Mingle. It was nice hearing them.
SPEAKER_03: We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and joint discussions about the show on Facebook. Maybe you can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of this year's program, 99PI at 99PI.org.
SPEAKER_03: I will always call it the Seerus Tower, never the Willis Tower. Stitcher, Sirius XM.
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