Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building (Los Angeles, California)
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Sears, Roebuck & Company
Mail Order Building |
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Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building, May 2008
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| Location | 2650 E. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, California |
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| Coordinates | 34°1′24″N 118°13′15″W / 34.02333°N 118.22083°WCoordinates: 34°1′24″N 118°13′15″W / 34.02333°N 118.22083°W |
| Built | 1927 |
| Architect | Nimmons, George C., |
| Architectural style | Art Deco |
| NRHP Reference # | |
| LAHCM # | 788 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | April 21, 2006 |
| Designated LAHCM | 2004 |
The Sears, Roebuck & Company product distribution center in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California, is a historic landmark that was one of the company's mail-order facilities, with a retail store on the ground floor.
The building was used for mail order until 1992, when Sears closed the distribution center and sold the building. Though Sears still operates a retail store on the ground floor, the rest of the enormous complex has remained vacant. The 1,800,000-square-foot (170,000 m2) complex has been the subject of several renovation proposals since the mid-1990s.
In December 1926, Sears, Roebuck & Company of Chicago announced that it would build a nine-story, height-limit building on East Ninth Street (later renamed Olympic Boulevard) at Soto Street to be the mail-order distribution center for the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states, to be constructed by Scofield Engineering Company. Architectural work was handled by George Nimmens Company.
The building was erected in six months, using materials that were all made in Los Angeles County, with the exception of the steel window sashes. To accomplish the feat, the contractor had six steam shovels and a large labor force working night and day shifts. It was reported that rock and sand for the cement work were being delivered to the site at the rate of twenty carloads daily. When the building was completed in late June 1927, the Los Angeles Times reported that:
All records for the erection of a huge structure were believed to have been broken when last week the Scofield Engineering Construction Company turned over the new $5,000,00 department store and mail-order house at Ninth street and Boyle avenue to Sears, Roebuck & Co., having completed this height-limit project in 146 working days, or 171 days of elapsed time.”
The building had nine stories and a basement, with a total floor area of approximately 11 acres (45,000 m2). The building was one of nine Sears mail-order distribution centers built between 1910 and 1929.
The sprawling distribution center was a marvel of technology when it opened; employees filled orders by roller-skating around the facility, picking up items and dropping them onto corkscrew slides for distribution by truck or rail. The building was one of the largest in Los Angeles, and it attracted more than 100,000 visitors in its first month of operation, not including shoppers at the ground-floor retail store.
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