The House that Came in the Mail

Roman Mars:
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 3 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 10 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 that we 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 an 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 cause it’s worth it, listening again. Thanks.

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Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
About 8 weeks ago, one of the producers here at 99pi ordered a book. Our office receives a lot of books, but this one, this one was special, everyone wanted to read it.

Sean:
Okay, first of all…

Kurt:
This book is beautiful!

Vivian:
I know.

Joe Rosenberg:
Only it wasn’t just any book.

Roman Mars:
That’s producer Joe Rosenberg.

Joe Rosenberg:
It was a catalog.

Katie:
Oh my god, it’s from 1908.

Avery:
Catalog number 177, of the Great Price Maker!

Kurt:
Oh, so there’s so much stuff…

Joe Rosenberg:
The Sears & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th-century American life.

Roman Mars:
In 1908, when this particular issue came out, one out of every five Americans were already subscribers.

Vivan:
So is this kind of like the Amazon warehouse before the Amazon warehouse?

Kurt:
Yes!

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Kurt:
Parasols and pipes.

Avery:
Really fancy-looking belts.

Vivian:
Ostrich feathers…

Kurt:
The world’s best ostrich feathers!

Sean:
Oh, headstones!

Roman Mars:
At its height, the Sears catalog offered over 100,000 items on 1400 pages. It weighed four pounds.

Joe Rosenberg:
Today, those 1400 pages provide us with a snapshot of American life in the first decade of the 20th century.

Sean:
$15.96 Our new William special’s single strap buggy harness.

Katie:
Wait, what is that?

Avery:
It’s a sheep shearing machine.

Katie:
Menstruation products have definitely evolved.

Roman Mars:
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.

Katie MIngle:
And …

Avery Trufelman:
Uh, wait! These are…

Katie MIngle:
Houses!

Roman Mars:
On page 596, Sears subscribers would come across a drawing of a house. Two stories. Nine rooms. Gabled roofs. And a price: $1,700.

Vivian Le:
Wait. $1,700 for…no!

Kurt Kohlstedt:
I think the whole thing!

Vivian Le:
For the house?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah!

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Roman Mars:
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 needed would arrive in a train car. 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.

Rosemary Thornton:
You throw open the door to this boxcar and you’re looking at 12,000 pieces of framing lumber and 20,000 cedar shakes.

Joe Rosenberg:
That’s Rosemary Thornton, an architectural historian and the author of The Houses That Sears Built. She says 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.

Rosemary Thornton:
And then you would begin the process of dutifully loading it either onto your mule and cart, or your model T.

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Rosemary Thornton:
“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,” Sears is warning you upfront: Do not listen to that man!

Roman Mars:
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 homes could be standardized, affordable, and within reach of every family. Long before the advent of housing developments and 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.

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Rosemary Thornton:
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 farm housewife was tidying things up she would naturally put the Sears Roebuck catalog on top of the Montgomery Ward catalog! I love that.

Joe Rosenberg:
By 1907, Sears and Roebuck was selling the then equivalent of 1.3 billion dollars of merchandise to American families every year. And it’s around this time that Richard Sears saw a way to sell even more.

Roman Mars:
Most American families were still living in multi-generational housing. 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 filled with old things, when they could move into new homes and fill them with new things, from Sears?

Joe Rosenberg:
And thus the Sears Modern Home Program was born. 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.

Rosemary Thornton:
There was literature that said if you really love this country, if you really want to do right by America, buy a house. Build a house. And that’s when kit homes really took off.

Joe Rosenberg:
Sears cut the lumber for almost all 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 already had over 40 models to choose from, but Sears would go on to offer 447 different designs.

Roman Mars:
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.

Rosemary Thornton:
They range from everything from what I would call a hunter’s cabin, literally, a two-room house for two or three hundred dollars, to the Sears Magnolia which was two thousand nine hundred square feet, two full bathrooms upstairs, a half bathroom downstairs, two full fireplaces, a den. It even had servants’ quarters and a servants’ private bath.

Joe Rosenberg:
Sears even offered a six-classroom schoolhouse, complete with an auditorium and library. But mostly it was homes.

Roman Mars:
Big, beautiful, empty homes. Just waiting to be filled with things.

Rosemary Thornton:
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, “place for a graphophone, spot for a piano player, place for two tufted chairs” and so he was kind of showing people how to stuff their houses with stuff from the Sears Roebuck catalog.

Joe Rosenberg:
And consumers obliged. There are tales of first-time homeowners who bought what you might call a “turn-key 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.

Roman Mars:
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 precut lumber frame, you didn’t need a carpenter either. You could treat it like any other consumer item.

Joe Rosenberg:
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. One was built from scratch essentially, using ordinary building materials and uncut “stick” lumber. The other with pre-cut lumber.

Roman Mars:
In the ad, the house with the stick lumber sits unfinished, people are collapsed in the front yard, exhausted.

Rosemary Thornton:
And then the house with the precut lumber, they’re sitting on the porch with a mint julep you know, having just the time of their life!

Joe Rosenberg:
And so, although many people did hire a contractor to build their Sears Home, many did not.

Rosemary Thornton:
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.

Joe Rosenberg:
For many families, these were their first homes with things like central heating, and insulation. In some neighborhoods, a Sears kit home might be the only house on the block with electricity.

Roman Mars:
And in 1911, Sears began offering competitive mortgages to their customers, which also helped people in neighborhoods of color to get around the practice of redlining.

Rosemary Thornton:
And redlining just meant that the bankers and the mortgage lenders would draw a line around neighborhoods where they would not loan money. 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.

Joe Rosenberg:
But then the company discovered that it had made a mistake. One that will probably sound all too familiar.

Roman Mars:
From the beginning, Sears had made sure their mortgage policy was like everything else in their catalog. Obtainable. 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 20’s, when interest rates were low and liquidity high, it wasn’t a problem.

Joe Rosenberg:
But when the Great Depression hit, things got ugly fast. The company ended up foreclosing on tens of thousands of its very own customers.

Rosemary Thornton:
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.

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Rosemary Thornton:
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.

Roman Mars:
After years of declining sales, Sears would finally close its Modern Homes department in 1940. 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.

Joe Rosenberg:
Meanwhile, most of the Sears homes: the Alhambras, the Argyles, the Magnolias, they ended up being sold to new owners who didn’t know what they’d 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…

Rosemary Thornton:
Unfortunately, after World War II during a corporate house cleaning, the sales records were destroyed.

Joe Rosenberg:
So the records are missing?

Rosemary Thornton:
The records are gone.

Joe Rosenberg:
Oh. Yeah, they’re not just missing, they’re gone.

Rosemary Thornton:
They’re gone. They’re in somebody’s burn pile. All that stuff was disposed of. So the only way to find these houses today is literally one by one.

Joe Rosenberg:
A few weeks after I interviewed Rosemary, I went to see some of the last remaining Sears homes outside of Cairo, Illinois, the town where Sears largest mill had once stood. When I got there, the only sign that there had ever been anything there was the name of a back road, Sears, leading to tiny houses — two Sears Rodessa models sitting next to each other. They were the twin Rodessa 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 Roebuck Road. I stopped to take a look, and 30 seconds later a man waved me inside.

[Dogs barking]

Guy Parks:
They’re just noisy, they don’t mean no… they’re trying to scare you off I think.

Joe Rosenberg:
Guy Parks greeted me in an old mechanics jumpsuit. As he settled into an easy chair in the living room, he told me that he’d lived on and off in Cairo since the 1950s and that he first laid eyes on this Rodessa, nearly 35 years ago.

Guy Parks:
The house was derelict. I mean, it was…the roof was leaking and the windows were broke out. It was still safe, but it was old.

Joe Rosenberg:
Guy ran into the owner a little while later, and the owner said to him, “How ‘bout I sell you the place, and you fix it up?”

Guy Parks:
I said, “Hel,l I can’t buy nothing. I ain’t saved a dollar out of my last check.” He said, “I’ll sell it to you for fifteen.” I thought he meant thousand. I said, “Man, I wouldn’t give that for it if it’s up in shape.” He says, “I’m talking about hundreds.” I said, “You wait right here.”

Roman Mars:
So Guy went out, came back an hour later with the cash, and bought the Rodessa for $1500, on the spot. Eventually, he’d buy the Rodessa next to it, too, the twin. His son lives there now.

Guy Parks:
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.

Joe Rosenberg:
Did you know that it was a Sears?

Guy Parks:
Yeah, I knew that all of these were Sears homes because the man lived down on the corner, he worked for Sears.

Joe Rosenberg:
Did he tell you any stories about the mill?

Guy Parks:
Oh yeah [laughing], but he always told me the bad stuff.

Joe Rosenberg:
Guy’s neighbor had told him that the job at the mill had been hard, dangerous work. 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 WWII. 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.

Guy Parks:
They didn’t make very many homes after that. 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, a little shotgun house. My wife’s sister lived there until she died.

Roman Mars:
Even Guy’s house isn’t very Sears anymore. He’s replaced a lot of the original parts over the years.

Guy Parks:
See that front door?

Joe:
Yeah.

Guy Parks:
The only thing in this house, in this room right here that’s original was that front door. Sears door.

Joe Rosenberg:
Before a series of race riots gutted the downtown Cairo in the 1960s, the town had nearly a hundred other Sears homes. Now maybe only a third of them are left. Guy watched as the rest were abandoned or reduced to rubble.

Guy Parks:
And the downtown just kept going down, going down, going down. You could see every month or so there’d be another business gone. Finally there was nothing down there but derelict buildings falling down. And since then all that’s gone. Yes, it’s all gone. Nothing’s the same.

Roman Mars:
For a long time, Guy Parks’ little Rodessa and its twin, were two of just a small handful of Sears homes that had been located and identified. When Guy bought his house, of the 75,000 kit homes that Sears built and shipped, mabye 5% had been properly documented. Most sat undiscovered. If you lived in a Sears house, chances are you didn’t even know it.

Joe Rosenberg:
But a little over twenty 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.

Rebecca Hunter:
It’s pure serendipity that I ended up in this field.

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Roman Mars:
And unlike Cairo, Elgin was not known for Sears homes. When Rebecca first got there in the mid-90s, almost no one there, herself included, even knew what a Sears house was.

Rebecca Hunter:
But then my partner died in 1995 and I was doing everything because it helped.

Joe Rosenberg:
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.

Rebecca Hunter:
That book happened to be lying on the dining room table 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 inmy neighborhood.

Joe Rosenberg:
And how many were you realistically expecting to find?

Rebecca Hunter:
I wasn’t expecting to find any, but it was really kind of fun. You know I had a goal, I had a mission and I forgot about the cold.

Joe Rosenberg:
And then, after oh, I don’t know, ten or fifteen minutes…

Rebecca Hunter:
I was walking down Plum Street and I saw this house and I instantly knew it was a Sears.

Joe Rosenberg:
Right there, after almost zero effort, Boom! a Sears house. Rebecca looks at the house, looks at the book, looks at the house, looks and the book, and its match. Craftsman style, tapered porch columns, the Avalon model.

Rebecca Hunter:
Then I said, huh, I wonder if I could walk around my neighborhood and find another one. And so I did.

Roman Mars:
On walk after walk, Rebecca kept finding Sears models.

Rebecca Hunter:
The Mitchell, the Crescent, the Vilonia.

Joe Rosenberg:
Then there was the Betsy Ross, the Osborne, the Alhambra.

Rebecca Hunter:
In fact there is one street that has the Sunlight model on one side of the street, the opposite is the Starlight. So you have the Starlight and the Sunlight across the street from each other.

Roman Mars:
But Rebecca wanted to confirm that these were Sears homes, so she sent a mailer out, asking each resident to go and inspect the basement.

Roman Mars:
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 home’s original Sears blueprints. And Rebecca’s not even done, there are still more houses waiting to be investigated.

Joe Rosenberg:
What did the total number of houses end up being?

Rebecca Hunter:
At the moment I think we’re at 237 Sears houses, and about a hundred from other companies.

Joe Rosenberg:
What’s more, most of the homes Rebecca found looked like they were straight out of the catalog. 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.

Roman Mars:
When the Elgin Watch Factory, which had employed a quarter of the town, closed in 1964, Elgin entered a localized recession, sparing it from the renovation craze of the 60s and 70s. Instead, Elgin’s Sears Homes simply sat there through the decades, untouched.

Joe Rosenberg:
Does anyone ever point out that the closing of the watch factory froze the houses in time?

Rebecca Hunter:
Oh yeah, we talk about that. We love it. We love it!

Joe Rosenberg:
Rebecca’s study of the Elgin Homes, along with the work of other researchers like Rose Thorton, 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 kit homes as possible. Including Rose.

Rebecca Hunter:
Some people do crossword puzzles, and some people do jigsaw puzzles. I guess I look for Sears homes.

Rebecca Hunter:
Well actually, me and Rose, and Dale, and Wendy, and Andrew, and Nigel, and Cindy, look for Sears houses.

Roman Mars:
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.

Joe Rosenberg:
Dale Wolicki specializes in kit homes built by Sears biggest competitor, the Aladdin Company. And Andrew Mutch is the numbers guy. He’s currently working with about half a dozen people on a database that would list every single Sears.

Roman Mars:
Meanwhile Nigel Tate, at 19, the youngest member of their team, has found over 1,000 kit homes without even leaving his desk. He uses Google street view.

Joe Rosenberg:
But mostly they hunt for houses the old-fashioned way. Chasing down clues, patrolling the mean streets of America, in a car, together.

Rebecca Hunter:
And Andrew is up in front and he’s got his computer, and he’s writing down addresses and Dale is driving, and Wendy and I are in the backseat, each with the camera. And everybody’s looking out the window and somebody says, “Hey what’s that over there on the right?”

Roman Mars:
Although, let’s face it, they’re not exactly bounty hunters.

Rosemary Thornton:
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 and we get in the car and we take off.

Joe Rosenberg:
The occasional misstep aside, Rose and Rebecca think they and other house hunters have helped identify nearly 50,000 kit homes from Sears and other companies.

Roman Mars:
So the next time a rag-tag 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.

Joe Rosenberg:
Have you ever seen a Sears school schoolhouse? Because I saw that they offered that one year.

Rosemary Thornton:
Oh yeah, I’ve been looking for that for a long time. Good lord, I’ve been hunting that thing down like it’s my job!

———

Roman Mars:
Years before Kurt Kohlstedt joined the team at 99% 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 the Sears plant, a huge city, block-sized warehouse distribution center, and retail store.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah, and when I was really young, I used to actually go shopping and 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. 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 ride, you know, not get too close to you.

Roman Mars:
So you basically don’t engage with it at all. It’s not really something like, you go up to you. You just cycle past it quickly.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Right.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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.

Roman Mars:
Right.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And I got really interested in this, not just as a building, but also as an urban phenomena, right? Like how they had turned this nothing into something again. So I, naturally being an architecture geek, started digging into the history of Sears.

Roman Mars:
So what did you find in your research?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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. 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.

Roman Mars:
And you’ve shown me pictures of these. They look surprisingly similar, even though they’re like scattered across the entire U.S. They have some different brick styles, but they’re all kind of boxy. They’re big windows and other details in common, including these really great distinctive art deco style towers.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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 serious buildings.

Roman Mars:
Totally.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And they served a function too. They basically concealed these huge water systems that then serve the floors below. And yeah, once 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 Croll Nimmons. 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.

Roman Mars:
But this is not the Sears Tower of Chicago or the now Willis Tower. It’s something else.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Right, right. That actually came many decades later. But amazingly, it was only like half as big as this really old complex that, you know, nobody really knows about. The old complex was built a bit west of downtown, and it was about three 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.’

Roman Mars:
Oh, I love it! They had their own commercial radio station. That’s so great.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah, I mean, they got sick of basically buying airtime on other stations, and eventually, they were like, hey, you know, we’ll just start our own radio station.

Roman Mars:
Of course.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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? 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.

Roman Mars:
Because it’s really hard to reuse a million-plus square feet inside of a city.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult and almost impossible to find a single corporate client who could take that on. And 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.

Roman Mars:
And so when you wrote me years and years and years ago, it was in part a story about how cities are reusing these series buildings.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
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. 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 happened?

Roman Mars:
Right?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
And it turns out that you get these very city-specific stories of abandonment and reuse that tell you something about these different places.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. Okay, so what are some of your favorites? What did you discover?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Well, in Seattle, famous for its coffee, there’s an old plant south of downtown that’s been transformed into the headquarters of Starbucks. 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. So it became a filling 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.

Roman Mars:
And so there’s a little Sears building in uptown Oakland, what we call uptown. If you drive up Telegraph or away from beautiful downtown Oakland, California, towards beautiful–

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Uptown Oakland, California.

Roman Mars:
You’ll see a little one. And what do they use that one for?

Kurt Kohlstedt:
So that place is really small, and it’s called the Telegraph Lofts and basically their live-work units. So they’re residential units and there’s some self-storage and other stuff, but mainly it’s residential.

Roman Mars:
Which is probably the thing we need the most in the Bay Area.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Oh, yeah, yeah. If there are empty buildings to be reused here, I would hope we could just turn them all into more housing.

Roman Mars:
Amen. All right. Thanks, Kurt.

Kurt Kohlstedt:
Yeah.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg and Kurt Kohlstedt. Mixed in 2018 by Sharif Youssef. Music by our director of sound Swan Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Emmet FitzGerald, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.
In the story, you also heard the voices of past 99pi producers Avery Trufelman and Katie Mingle. Oh, it’s nice hearing them. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. 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 here program, 99pi, at 99pi.org.

I will always call it the Sears Tower. Never the Willis Tower. Stitcher, SiriusXM.

 

 

 

    1. Chris

      Came to say this as well. A whole neighborhood of Sears homes by the national arboretum.

  1. Maria Salahori

    Interesting epidosde! Use Google street view to find “174 S Douglas St
    Powell, Wyoming”–I briefly lived in this town and remember that someone, not the owner (whom I don’t know,), told me that this house “was ordered out of the Sears catalog.” Seems like it could be a Fullerton model if that’s true.

  2. Lori T.

    You solved a mystery for me! I used to live in a kit Cape in New England. One day a woman was outside my house. I went out with my baby on my hip and asked if i could help her. She asked if she could take a picture of my house. I sais yes, but was too baby tired to think to ask why. I’ve wondered ever since why she wanted a picture of my old tiny house. I think now i know! Thanks!

  3. Andy Keep

    Great show! I got to tour a Sears home in Bloomington, IN, as part of an annual tour of historic homes in Bloomington. There might have been two, it has been several years since I went on there tour, so I don’t remember the specifics.

    The tour still happens every year as part of the Bloomington Restorations Inc. tour of homes: http://bloomingtonrestorations.org/bri-tour-of-homes/

    The city of Bloomington also describes a few Sears homes in Bloomington, IN: https://bloomington.in.gov/neighborhoods/historic/mcdoel

  4. Cinnamon

    I knew it! Listening to this episode, I remembered taking a tour of the Strathearn Historical Park in Simi Valley, CA and learning that there were many kit homes in the city in the late 19th century. I believed there was at least one of them left and still standing and I was right! I found the article linked below on the Los Angeles Times website. It explains that one home is still standing and privately owned (I’ve driven by it so many times over the years) and another was moved to the Historical Park and can be toured by the public. From what I understand, these homes played a huge role in the creation of this community and the speed with which it was established.

    Thanks so much for this episode. Fascinating stuff!

    http://articles.latimes.com/2004/aug/19/home/hm-prefabside19

  5. This was a fun episode. Not to ruin the fun for the house hunters but someone from Google might be able to help narrow things down using StreetView data and some machine learning.

  6. Stefan Bast

    I live in the little mountain town of Breckenridge, CO and we have one (that I know of for sure, maybe two) Sears home(s) that are protected as historical sites. Pretty neat to get the story behind them.

  7. mike s

    Great episode.
    My wife and I bought, what we believe, is a Sears catalog home in 2011.
    It’s concrete block and is believe to be built from 1908-1910. The previous owners left some information about the house. Great stories and we LOVE this house.

    Would love to know about the database and more.

    Our google street view is from before we bought the house but if interested:
    1622 Middleton Street.
    Middleton, WI 53562

  8. b solle

    great episode. i live close to the repurposed sears building and bike greenway in minneapolis. the sears store was a shame to lose but we applaud its reuse.

  9. Jeff Koppelmaa

    I live in a Sears Roebuck kit home in Jerome, Arizona. W.A. Clark bought and built rows of them for his mining executives and connected them with wooden boardwalks. We still have a whole neighborhood of Sears homes on “Company Hill” here.

  10. Donna

    Thousands of Sears kit homes stand solid today. Amazingly a company Amerisus started selling kit eco homes about ten years ago and now has become the top kit supplier in the nation delivering everything to customers, builders and skilled homeowners, so that a complete home can be built ready for occupancy.

  11. LINDA NORRIS

    My Grandma, Aunt and Uncle lived at 4618 Indiana Ave. What a wonderful child hood I had living in that house. We all talk about the screened in porch on the back and the summer nights we would all gather and laugh ect. It was a magical neighborhood that still exsists.

  12. Connor Reilly

    During the postscript discussion, I was reminded of a repurposed Sears building I’ve visited before in Atlanta. It’s called Ponce City Market and its a major destination on Atlamts’s “beltway” bike path. Ponce City Market holds a wonderful food court and all sorts of destination stores to shop at. They’re proud of the history and the Market’s website discusses the background of the location.

  13. Tony

    Great episode, as usual!

    I used to work at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, VA. There are two rickety little cottages on campus that were thought to be Sears kit homes, but I don’t recall if it was ever confirmed. The ADST did a good write-up on the overall construction of NFATC where they’re briefly mentioned.

    “In fact, saving the old building turned out to be a major asset to the complex for its usefulness and dignified appearance that evokes an earlier era. There are two white and ugly cottages abutting Route 50 we were also obliged to keep. The Historical Association believed they were Sears Roebuck prefabricated houses dating back to 1929, and therefore of historic interest.”

    from https://adst.org/2016/05/the-battle-to-create-the-foreign-service-institute/

  14. Loved this episode. We are distributors for a System Built Home supplier that is using a lot of these concepts. Due to a skilled labor shortage (we build in ski resort communities in Colorado) these panel homes allow for a faster build in severe climates and much of the labor is in a controlled environment, and we get a fixed price on the lumber package. Last year we had a 29% price increase on lumber due to the new tariffs on raw materials.

    Since there are multiple versions of each home plan they offer, they still feel like custom homes.

    Here is drone video of our exterior walls being set on a rural ranch.
    https://www.mountain-loghomes.com/whisper-creek-log-homes

  15. Grimstod

    Fantastic episode. Now I am always looking for Sears Homes. This is why I listen to this podcast.

  16. J. Davis

    Absolutely loved this episode. Being a resident of Illinois and a lover of architecture Sears homes have intrigued me.

    Similar to Elgin, IL you can find a very large still remaining remnant of Sears home in Carlinville, IL. Standard Oil company opened up two coalmines in the the area and meet the housing boom crisis by placing a $1 million dollar order with Sears.

    There are several websites which document this history, you check them out!

    http://www.carlinville.com/sears-homes/

    http://www.route66university.com/study/essay_thorn_std.php

    http://interactive.tegna-media.com/video/embed/embed.html?id=2581158&type=video&title=The%20Carlinville%20neighborhood%20that%20Sears%20built&site=63&playerid=6918249996581&dfpid=32805352&dfpposition=Video_prestream_external%C2%A7ion=home

    Enjoy!!!

  17. Jim DiGuiseppi

    Great episode, but I was surprised you didn’t mention Buster Keaton’s “One Week” as a humorous take on a homemade home.

  18. Paul LoSacco

    Another great episode! I used to live in Pennsylvania and would frequently drive past a cute home that had a small “Sears House” sign in the front yard. The show encourage me to look for it n Google Maps. It’s at 103 Bondsville Rd, Downingtown, PA and you can see it on Google Street View. It appears to be a Sherburne model and looks fairly original.

  19. Steve Madden

    Pittsburgh has quite a few of them left. There’s streets and streets of them here.

    1. Affinity

      Unfortunately, I tried searching but can’t get any info on it

  20. Joy W

    I believe the elementary school I attended was a Sears school. Alice Elementsry in Hibbing Mn. Sadly, it’s no longer there

  21. A Sanders

    Great episode and a fascinating glimpse into early 20th century industrialism/consumerism.

    I do wish they had talked at least a little about George Barber homes, which predated the Sears mail order house business. Barber homes were just mail order plans, not kits; but he was one of the first architects to take advantage of the mail order catalog phenomenon in the 1890’s. By the time he stopped publication of his catalogs in 1918, he had sold over 20,000 plans. Many Barber homes still stand today.

  22. Dawn R

    If you’re interested in hearing more about these beautiful homes, you should reach out to Rosemary Thornton -she has a blog and FB page entitled “Sears Kit Homes”…she is an expert on these homes and would make for a great podcast.

    1. Shari Davenport

      The last Sears Modern Homes catalog was issued in 1940. There were Sears offices still open in 1941 and 42, and still sold kits through those offices, some models not seen in the last catalogs, only available through those local offices. For more information, see this blog post

      http://www.sears-homes.com/2012/11/yes-virginia-sears-homes-were-built.html?m=1

      There was a brief expansion of Sears into Home Clubs, in the northeast, but the expansion didn’t last long, and didn’t go far, except in limited neighborhoods, in Sidney, NY, Cranford, NJ, North Plainfield, NJ, Briarcliff Manor, NY, Grandyle Village, NY, North Tonawanda, NY, and Elyria, OH. Some areas didn’t sign up enough people, and were never built by Sears. In any case, none of those areas were built by the homeowners, only by contractors who were contracted by Sears to do the building.

      For a short time, in the early 50s, Sears did an actual prefab homes – not kits – program. They were called Homart Homes. They were true prefabs, built from preassembled panels, and other materials. There is a story about them, from a Sears Homes blogger, at

      http://www.sears-homes.com/2017/11/a-happy-ending-for-1950s-sears-house.html?m=1

      It’s definitely gotten much less publicity than the original Sears Modern Homes program, but is just as legitimate a Sears home, as the others.

  23. I am currently half way through my re-listening (second time) of all 99% invisible episodes :) love em. Thanks Roman. Anyway, I first listened to the Sears mail-order homes over 2 years ago. So, I now have come accross this link and was reminded: https://www.nbc4i.com/news/u-s-world/house-ordered-from-sears-catalog-in-1920s-still-standing/?fbclid=IwAR0L7hrMy95EeV5x-BoKYXbQyshuyDb23qLjfQ0H0x_dvdbKnUA0naHdrtM

    By the way, my favorite 2 episode is “the purple brick hotel” and the round tower in south africa.

    Thank you for filling my driving time in the best way possible.

  24. Heather Temple

    When I was doing work for the 1990 census I had many homeowners proudly tell me that their home was a Sears catalog home. In West Milton, PA.

  25. JG

    There were also mail-order jails. The cells and the set-up to lock and unlock them, came in kit form. The community built a brick shell around them. One still stands in Newport, Vermont, although it is no longer used, thank goodness. The former sheriff gave me a tour and it didn’t seem like a place I would like to be incarcerated. Still, the word is the last sheriff to operate the jail served food cooked by his wife that was good enough to make a stay almost worthwhile. The paper I write for ran my article about the place and another piece, written by a colleague about the area’s remaining mail-order homes.

  26. D Mayes

    As far as reusing Sears buildings, a former Sears store housed the San Diego Central Public Library until 2013.

  27. Seth

    Still the same great podcast. Kinda strange to have Audi and Dunkin Commercials.
    I miss the ads for Squarespace, the real real, article and slack.

  28. Sears homes are well known; has anyone heard of Amit home named “O’Malley’s Easy Do”? I owned a place built in 1977 in the quaint Arizona town of Strawberry. My neighbor then who had built his in 1975 from the same kit and told me the name.

    Ironically I moved to central Canada and happened to but a 1917 Eaton home, I cant avoid the kit homes.

    Loved the episode, especially that clever bit of sizing the Sears catalog a tad mallee than the Montgomery Ward one.

  29. David Rowh

    I frikkin LOVE this podcast. I’ve read the book twice since I got it for Christmas last year. There’s a Sears house 2 blocks from my house here in Salisbury NC and I drive by it several times a week just to look at it. Thanks for this episode and all the rest and please keep them coming.

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