The Haines Shoe House
Near York, Pennsylvania
In nineteen forty-eight, Mahlon Haines handed his architect a work boot and said: build me a house like this. Haines was the most relentless self-promoter in the York County shoe business. By nineteen thirty-one his chain was reported to be the largest in the United States, and by nineteen thirty-five it had fifty stores across Pennsylvania and northern Maryland.
The shoe house he commissioned is twenty-five feet tall and forty-eight feet long, with a living room in the toe, a kitchen in the heel, and three bedrooms tucked inside the upper. Haines himself barely lived in it. Instead he used it as a billboard that happened to have plumbing, letting senior citizens and newlyweds stay for free.
The house still stands beside Route Thirty, a piece of programmatic roadside architecture that is hard to drive past without doing a double-take.
