Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 21, 2006

The Boyle Heights Sears building at Olympic and Soto is boarded up and abandoned. Windows are smashed; tiles on the entrance staircase are chipped. A concrete table in front of the snack bar in the east parking lot is broken in half. It’s a sad ending for one of the area’s most iconic big buildings, one that attracted generations of Angelenos and supplied thousands of local jobs for nearly a century. There’s something Ozymandian about this building. Its slow decay is testament to the inevitability of change, even for the once-mighty Sears. 

In an age when we can get everything from fresh sushi to prescription drugs delivered to our door with a few clicks, the idea of a printed catalog may seem old fashioned. But imagine what a revolutionary change it must have been in the 1890s, when Sears, Roebuck & Co. first started sending out mail order catalogs to all corners of America. Rural populations now had access to the same kinds of goods that the urban populations did, stuff that their local general stores didn’t have the space to stock. Black people living in the south during the Jim Crow era could order what they needed without being subjected to discrimination by racist shopkeepers. 

Sears was a big effing deal, culturally and financially. When they went public in 1906, it was the first major retail IPO in American history; and by the time this massive facility in Boyle Heights was built in 1927, they were sending out 75 million catalogs annually, and selling to 11 million customers. That was one out of every three American families. At one time Sears was the seventh-largest corporation in the world.  

The nine-story building at Olympic and Soto was one of 12 facilities across the country that anchored the Sears mail order business. If you bought a pair of pants from your home in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, western New Mexico or Hawaii (plus parts of Asia), your order would be processed and shipped from here. They must have had an entire floor devoted to pants. 

In 1927, Sears was in the middle of a big shift in its strategy. As America was rapidly urbanizing, the company started focusing on brick and mortar department stores in major cities, to augment its mail order business. The Boyle Heights Sears was one of their few buildings that pulled double duty as both a mail order center and a retail store. The bottom two floors housed 57,600 square feet of clothing, appliances, furniture, toys, hardware…anything and everything the middle class consumer could desire. 

An aerial photo from the building’s NRHP nomination form (see page 15), taken just after its construction, shows a commercial castle surrounded by…almost nothing. Part of Sears’s MO at the time was to build its department stores away from the major commercial centers of a city, and cater to the burgeoning car crowd. The main entrance on Olympic Blvd. may have been the prettiest, with its decorative concrete frames, art deco lighting fixtures and the signature Sears logo hanging just above. But there were auxiliary entrances on the east and west side, next to the two parking lots. You could even get your car lubed while you shopped. 

The architect of this Sears was George C. Nimmons, who went way back with the Sears company. Nimmons (alongside William K. Fellows) designed the very first Sears mail order center in Chicago in 1906, and was responsible for nine more, including the Boyle Heights one. Like the others, this location includes a tall central tower that housed the mail order department and warehouses, supported by wider masses that contained all the retail floorspace. Nimmons went for reinforced concrete construction, fairly uncommon for an industrial building of this size, which meant that he could reduce the floor height and cram more building into less space (which means less $$, too).

Nimmons went for the art deco style popular in the late ‘20s. Much of the original detailing is still intact, especially on the north facade facing Olympic. While the Boyle Heights Sears may not be an architectural masterpiece on par with Parkinson & Parkinson’s Bullocks Wilshire department store, I would take its tasteful bits of decorative embellishment any day over the windowless beige walls and fluorescent lighting that I remember from the Sears of my childhood. 

This building is a casualty of both strategic missteps on the part of Sears’ management and the continuing evolution of consumer culture. Sears got out of the mail order business in the early 1990s, and after this location shut down its entire warehouse and mail order department, 1300 people lost their jobs; the upper floors have been collecting dust ever since. Sears’s slow decline continued into the new millennium, as it lost ground to Walmart, Target and online shopping. By 2010 Sears was no longer profitable, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2018. The years since have witnessed a steady stream of liquidation sales and store closures. The Boyle Heights retail store finally closed in April of 2021. 

What’s next? Nobody knows for sure. Over the past couple decades plans have been floated to remodel it, or transform it into a mixed-use complex combining apartments, restaurants and retail, or add a charter school. Oscar de la Hoya had even planned to buy it for a minute, just before the 2008 recession hit. The property’s current owner Izek Shomof told the LA Times earlier this year that he wants to use the space to create a “Life Rebuilding Center” – a massive campus dedicated to housing and helping thousands of homeless people. Good luck with that buddy. Who knows if we’ll ever see that distinctive neon SEARS sign glowing its eerie green again?

Recommended Reading

+Sears, Roebuck & Co. Mail Order Building’s NRHP nomination form

+Sears building in Boyle Heights faces an uncertain future, with ‘bigger’ plans in the works (The Eastsider, 2022)

+Can a giant, empty Sears building help solve homelessness in Los Angeles? (LA Times, 2022)

+Remembering The Boyle Heights Sears: A Tribute To An Eastside Icon

+After almost a century, landmark Sears store in Boyle Heights will soon close

+How Sears mail-order catalogs undermined Jim Crow racism