Sears Boyle Heights

In nineteen twenty-seven, Sears, Roebuck and Company built its West Coast distribution headquarters in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The nine-story Art Deco building went up in just six months at a cost of five million dollars, and when it opened more than one hundred thousand people came to see it in the first month alone. From here, Sears served mail-order customers across California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Hawaii, shipping everything from farm tools to prefabricated houses.

The two-hundred-twenty-six-foot tower became a neighborhood landmark. Sears closed the distribution center in January of nineteen ninety-two after sixty-four years of operation, eliminating nearly thirteen hundred jobs. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand six and has since been converted to housing and retail, still anchoring the Boyle Heights skyline.