The massive Sears complex on Roosevelt Boulevard was imploded in 1994. | Photo courtesy of Langan
On October 31, 1994 the Sears Eastern Regional Catalogue Headquarters on Roosevelt Boulevard was imploded. This ended the 74-year reign of the complex and its 14-story clock tower as the gateway to Northeast Philadelphia.
Yet, its memory lives on in the minds of the thousands of Philadelphians who worked or shopped there. Some vestiges remain as well. Its power plant’s chimney serving as a billboard for Home Depot, one of the stores in the shopping center that replaced it, and its fire station, a miniature of the old Sears headquarters that serves and protects the surrounding Oxford Circle community.
Memories remain especially strong among former employees because Sears cultivated its morale with its own house newspaper, the Sears News–Graphic, an “all employees picture newspaper.” Employees were encouraged by the company to feel like they belonged to an extended family. Sears prided itself on promoting from within, and its officers and Sears owners, the Rosenwald family, were on a first name basis with many of the workers.
An aerial view of the Northeast Philadelphia Sears Tower complex in 1939. | Photo: Public Domain
Sears, originally Sears, Roebuck and Company, focused on catalogue marketing to farm households. When the economic Panic of 1893 set in, Roebuck sold his interest in the firm to Julius Rosenwald, a Chicago clothing manufacturer who was one of their larger creditors. By 1908, Rosenwald had become the company’s president and Sears prospered under his leadership. In 1919, Julius decided to expand the company’s catalogue business to Philadelphia and sent his son Lessing Rosenwald to scout out a suitable location. Lessing identified a 120-acre farm located ideally at the junction of two railroads, the Pennsylvania and the Reading, which would compete for Sears’ business with their best possible services and freight rates. Philadelphia was the site of Sears’ fourth mail order facility. The company would eventually have 14 of them with Philadelphia being its second largest in facility with over 5,000,000 square feet of space, second in sales volume, and employing 7,000.
Lessing stayed on in Philadelphia as the mail order facility’s general manager from its opening in 1920 until 1929. He eventually became the chairman of Sears from 1932 until 1939. After 1939, Lessing devoted his life to collecting rare books and art and managing the family charity. In 1941, he donated 2,600 rare books to the Library of Congress and prints and drawings to the National Gallery of Art. These came from his collection housed in the gallery wing of his home, Alverthorpe Manor, that he had built in Jenkintown in 1939. Lessing’s family charity was a major benefactor making fellowship grants to African American artists, writers, researchers, and intellectuals and to various Jewish charities.
A rendering of a new Sears, Roebuck & Co. retail store planned for Roosevelt Boulevard next to the Sears Tower complex. The building was designed by Ballinger Co. and opened for business on August 10, 1955. | Image courtesy of Image courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
Sears branched out into department store retail sales and added a location the Philadelphia mail order plant in October 1925. This was the company’s fifth outlet. 30 years later, Sears built a stand-alone three story department store within the Roosevelt Boulevard complex.
The grand opening of this new store on August 10, 1955 occurred near the peak of Sears’ success as America’s largest retailer, with 400,000 employees and $19 billion in annual sales. The opening was the occasion for a grand celebration with the company’s chairman cutting the ribbon. Lessing returned as the event’s honored guest and renewed acquaintances with many who knew him as their former boss while chatting with many long-service employees. That day the new store’s 1,100 employees served 30,000 customers.
Left: The smokestack of Sears’ former power station is now a billboard for Home Depot. Right: Engine 70 at 4800 Langdon Street was designed to resemble the old Sears Tower. | Photos: Ed Duffy
The company’s catalogue sales gradually declined as big box discount stores like Walmart and Kmart spread across the United States. Sears issued its final general catalogue in 1993. After the Philadelphia mail order plant’s 1994 implosion, 48 acres of the property were redeveloped as a shopping center and the remaining 72 acres were sold to Cardone Industries, a successful aftermarket auto parts manufacturer. Improvements to Cardone’s new site consisted in part of shifting the demolition debris of the Sears tower into the abandoned Pennsylvania Railroad cut that separated its warehouses from Whitaker Avenue, providing the company with direct access there. The bricks used in constructing the Sears tower were manufactured less than a mile away at the Keystone Brick Company. The 132-acre brickyard was sold to the United States government for a naval aviation supply facility during World War II. In the end, the bricks were returned to the earth from which they came.
Very interesting story, we drove to near Oxford Ave where a crowd could see the Seats buildings be imploded.
One thing I would like to say was that Sears was a logistics service company and they imploded their logistics building to benefit other businesses moving to a mall site built for other logistics companies!
Mr Duffy,
Thank you for an incredibly informative article about the building we all knew and loved, but of the Rosenwald family and their contribution to build Sears into the 20th century powerhouse that it was for 100 years.
There is a Facebook group dedicated to Sears in the Philadelphia area, it’s called Sears Philadelphia. If anyone is interested in joining, here is the link.
https://www.facebook.com/share/g/A5DQRtMY5e5wRNrn/?mibextid=K35XfP
Many, many of my relatives worked for Sears, and its iconic tower was something that I saw every day of my childhood.
As an adult, I watched it imploded, while quietly singing “New Lamps for Old” (Procul Harum), while very quietly crying.
In many ways, Sears’ catalog distribution infrastructure was a precursor to Amazon. The inability of Sears to transition their catalog business to the Internet and expand it to become a complete online marketplace for everything — in essence, to become Amazon — is one of the greatest missed opportunities in business history.
I and my son were there the day they took it down. In fact, I still have a few bricks stored in my garage.
I miss Sears, our family always purchased any and all our appliances from Sears.
Same here. And one of those appliances purchased in the late ’60’s is still being used in my household. I also miss Sears; especially their spectacular Christmas catalog.
I grew up on Whitaker Avenue, across the Boulevard from Sears. I remember smell of popcorn and the vacuum cleaner demonstration at the entrance from the parking lot. The elevated parking lot was built by the city in a trade-off where Sears built a subway station underneath in anticipation of a subway extension that never happened. At shift change, there were dozens of PTC (and later SEPTA) busses lined up on both side of the Boulevard as employees crossed via a tunnel built under thethorofare. This facility was the largest Sears on the East Coast. The day of the implosion, some friends and I watched it from a rooftop almost directly across the Boulevard.There was no reason to bring down the tower. It should have stayed as a historic landmark.
My wife, son and dog witnessed the implosion that day. I worked there after high school for a few years while attending night college. I was a picker/packer for Dept. 11, home goods; much lighter packages than hardware which was located next to us. In hardware, guys picking found cattle prods and now you had to beware of these jokers who would prod you when you weren’t looking. Starting wage was about $35 weekly and after 6 months a 51/2 cent raise came your way. We all strived to reach the $2 an hour goal. I was canned for writing something on a wall and decided to take Sears to labor court to try and get unemployment. I showed up and Sears sent 4 lawyers. Needless to say…
We had many friends who worked for Sears and who benefited greatly from one of the key aspects of the company’s model, profit sharing. Many of today’s business owners should consider this practical idea which provided not just employment but a share in the success of a job well done. Your essay shows the owners still made enough money to live in comfort and to be benefactors to society in general.
On a Saturday morning, my father drove me to the hardware store in the old building. We parked the car in the hudge parking lot and crossed a bridge over the railroad tracks. As we entered the store there was a popcorn vender making popcorn.
Hell, my grandparents came from Ireland and worked at sears. Do you have relatives that worked there? My grandfather’s name was John Duffy.
I grew up a few blocks from the Sears building. We often played football on the Roosevelt Boulevard median strip and afterwards went to Sears for a Philly pretzel, a Coke, browse through the store (especially the toy department across the street) and watch the frequent product demonstrations. Sears was an integral part of our lives in many ways.
This is so true, not just for Sears but also Gimbel’s and Wanamaker, FAO schwarz and so many other American institutions. They were experiences that left indelible memories on generations. And then I think about Amazon, who has inherited that, and Amazon is no experience at all. Has no mark on Americans lives in shaping their memories the way these stores did. And That’s a shame. Was so much more disconnected from each other these days.