CEGU

Sears, A Not-So-Distant Memory

I remember once, roaming around a seemingly infinite and endless Sears. The tile floors, fluorescent lights, and duplicated rows of lawnmowers were inevitably a part of my childhood. The excitement of being able to snag a snack and walk through the labyrinthine structure was a vivid, visceral memory. It was one I could not bear to forget. It was almost a sacred day when we went to this Sears because it was the only day the entire family could spend the whole day together, save for holidays. In a way, shopping there became a holiday of sorts. While this feeling was artificially created by the department store, it was in no way artificial to me.

But it was not to last; Sears was soon to face its downfall. That Sears back home in Omaha, Nebraska was nestled near a large mall complex called Crossroads. As I watched Crossroads slowly wither, so did the Sears, and it was eventually demolished. The next to go was the quaint Barnes and Noble on the same block, that once lived side by side with Sears. I was reminded how transient it all was when one day there was nothing left of the block but an empty parking structure, a gaping empty lot, and a newly installed Target. As for the empty lot, the hodgepodge of current developers have yet to make due on any promises for the land. Speculations continue to swirl about what will happen to the land that is still an “eyesore” of an empty lot.¹ My grandmother guessed that the local public university, University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) would buy the land. Upon hearing the UNO speculation, my brows raised as I thought back to Chicago. 

I recalled how Kennedy-King, a City College of Chicago, now lives on the same Englewood block that a Sears once did. I was more perplexed–wondering how the life, death, and legacy of Sears became a defining part of the block it was on. The story of Sears then transformed from just a childhood memory into a socio-cultural phenomenon. But to be clear, it was not one that lives in dusty archives (however cool they may be) or an event postulated by someone far away in a different land, as is the case in some of academia. No, the life of this particular phenomenon was intertwined with many peoples’ hearts, including my own. It morphed into a personal story, where the realm of research and personal reality became distinctly intertwined. The longer I stared at Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, and the more research I did, I realized that Sears was not just a department store, it was a social barometer for the future and history of the block. 

Part One: Sears, the “Beehive of Trade”

However, this hubbub was not all due to the presence of Sears alone; it was a joint effort. Becker Ryan and Co. was one of the first more permanent shops to arrive on 63rd, becoming a community staple almost immediately after it was built around 1902.¹⁰ Many surrounding shops then began to grow alongside Becker Ryan and Co. due to its early pioneering presence on the block. It was a family-owned local business, and it offered a variety of goods, from home care to clothes (much like Sears). In the early 1930s, Sears bought Becker Ryan and Co., initially operating it as an affiliate before eventually incorporating it to the Sears on 63rd the area became familiar with. ¹¹ As Sears stood in the same place that Becker Ryan and Co. once did, the franchise department store not only took its address but also absorbed all of the community connections, customer loyalties, and trust Becker Ryan had previously established. Capitalizing on the growth of Becker Ryan and Co., Sears morphed into a retail epicenter and a multifaceted socio-cultural indicator of the block because of its connections to the community and appeal to shoppers. Thus, from the humble yet deep roots of Becker Ryan and Co., the imposing form of Sears grew.

The following decades saw the fall of smaller stores that once surrounded Sears, an anchor of the block. As such, buildings were ripped down, and gaping lots materialized. In the 1980s, the empty lot where the Stratford once stood across from Sears was paved into a road, as pictured in a 1989 Sanborn map. This entire area and its surroundings became a place of parking lots, new roads, and iron/concrete buildings that all suggest increased manufacturing activity. Finally, in the 1990s, an American Express moved into the block on 63rd Street, but that was the extent of the business life there–further emphasizing that the “retail well” of sorts, had long run dry. Beyond this block in Englewood, Sears lost its prosperity and the American mall began to decline as well due to “the closure of anchor stores like Macy’s, JCPenney, and Sears.” Without anchor stores to draw “large crowds and [help] support smaller retailers…key tenants began shutting down due to bankruptcy, declining sales, or shifting retail trends.”¹⁷ The loss of Sears ripples throughout the commercial district, whether it be confined to a mall or an entire street. Simultaneously, “large retailers like Walmart and Target began to dominate the market, offering a wider range of products at lower prices,” and the department store had no chance of revival.¹⁸The Englewood location’s closure was the beginning of a drawn-out end for Sears. By comparing the 1926 Sanborn to the 1989 Sanborn, one can visualize the changes that 63rd Street experienced as it transitioned from a bustling commercial district in the 1920s to a seemingly barren one in the 1980s, with the loss of Sears and Roebuck as a catalyst.

A 1923 advertisement for Sears further reveals the racialized and gendered “policies” of Sears. The advertisement features white women sporting “smart, well-made, and moderately priced” clothing, looking classy, elegant and, of course, well-dressed. Not simply promoting a product, the ad is a representation of the model consumer that Sears caters to when marketing their customer experience. It is the epitome of who, at the time, Sears wanted their customers to be: the polished white middle class.

Part Two: Sears Reclaimed, A Black Female Multigenerational Account

She sighed, “I mean, we were allowed in, and if you had the money to buy something you could. But we couldn’t drink out of the fountains. So I don’t think it was about ‘like’. It was the only place to go.” My pencil lifted from the paper, and I looked up at her. Her wrinkled brown skin glistened in the sunlight. I smiled.

She paused before telling me, “But you know something, Roebuck, he’s black. He’s one of us.” I balked, finding this perplexing. “He’s black?” I asked, my heart sinking because I knew he was not. A quick Google search would disprove that fact- but I chose not to mention it. She nodded, swelling with pride, her eyes sparkling. “He’s one of us” she repeated, with more strength this time. With so little representation in the segregated South, Roebuck being “one of us” was not only a strong sentiment, it was a surviving sliver of hope.

My brow furrowed, and I wondered just where this urban legend had come from. After speaking to my grandma’s family, and learning they too heard that Roebuck–the co-founder of Sears and Roebuck–was black. Research informed me that rival companies purposefully started that rumor about Roebuck to try to discredit and ‘taint’ the name of Sears; revealing how Sears and its rivals cherished their perception amongst their ideal clientele: the white middle class.²¹ Yet, it was this ‘slandering’ campaign-turned-urban legend that allowed Sears to become a welcoming place for some black people unlike other stores of the era. Petty business rivalry may have unintentionally brought Sears a key portion of its clientele.²² In addition, while Sears was not made with the black shopper in mind, its mail order catalogs actually enabled many black, rural southerners to buy from them by allowing them to “make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.”²³ Ironically, Sears had become an upscale, middle-class establishment where people of color could visit and feel welcomed. 

In the words of my mother, Traci, Sears became “a hallmark of the black community, because black people felt welcome there. It felt special in part, because it was affordable. There was also nowhere else to go. It seems like they had a niche with the black community-or at least, a niche with us.” My mom found that after walking into Sears, “something just changed. We could find clothes on one floor, and a lawnmower on the next. When I was young, as soon as we walked in, I could smell the delicious scent of those sweet and salty nuts for sale. Those were always such a nice treat.” 

My mom’s voice softened, her lips curved into a smile and her dark brown eyes adopted a faraway look. “The walls were painted a neat lovely color, the carpets were plush, and there was always a nice steady flow of people, but it never felt busy. It was never chaotic like Kmart was. It was a nice middle class department store. It was special.” At Sears, lawn mower buyers could commune with clothing shoppers, mothers could walk leisurely, and shoppers could find peace. Sears was where shoppers of all backgrounds were united in those endless aisles, interconnected by the simple fact that they were all Sears patrons. Now, it seemed like Sears was not just retail royalty, but a kind of retail church, because of the community it provided, and perceived sense of elevated peace it gifted shoppers with, coupled with the uplifted feeling of belonging my mom felt when roaming the bright, endless aisles.

My mother also recalls visiting stores like Yonkers, where she not only felt out of place, but it nearly felt as if her hands were glued to her sides, “silently forbidding her from touching anything”. So, if anything, it seems this version of Roebuck that lived in the collective black imagination helped to create a universe where my mom and my grandma could not only shop for goods, but could feel welcomed and cherished as they did so. This was a kind of grassroots black reclamation of Sears. It began in the world of fiction and corporate espionage, but through an enduring spirit, and my grandma’s hope, a black Roebuck became incarnate through a widespread, homespun urban legend. Let there be no doubt: Sears was an inherently exclusive place and a biased brand originally created for a white audience. However, through people like my mother and grandmother, there was certainly a notable difference in who Sears was made for and who it was ultimately reclaimed by.

Yet, this life Sears was short-lived. As my mom observed “After a certain point, I didn’t have any reason to go to Sears anymore… I tried to go back but it was practically a waste of time, what with all the other stores cropping up”. It seemed, with rising competition for more specialized stores, this religious experience died with the arrival of new elevated shopping experiences. Mom also remarked, “Then it felt like one day, magically there was Home Depot and Lowe’s. That was another layer accounting for the demise of Sears. Soon enough, Sears just felt like so much less of what it used to be.” Eventually, it was not just less–it was gone, for all its clientele: white and black.

Part Three: Kennedy-King and a Reclamation of Black Identity in a Post-Sears World

Kennedy-King College earned its new name in 1969, during the heat of the Civil Rights era, its namesake being John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.²⁷ This impact of social justice became more apparent as the school transitioned from being predominantly white to predominantly black. Civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference found a home at Kennedy-King, launching the “Chicago Campaign” in 1966 to tear down racial barriers.^28,29 Many students, like Leonard Walsh, experienced these changes firsthand. Graduating from Englewood High School in June of 1958, Leonard entered Wilson Junior College that year before leaving to join the US Military. When he returned to Kennedy-King, he found two major changes had occurred: the student population had significantly grown in number, and the school had become predominantly black.³⁰ He also found that the school had added a Negro History course that would eventually pave the way for the formation of the Negro History Club in 1969, which orccured in the same year as the college’s change in name.³¹

At the time, the demands of the Negro History Club ranged from small-scale to revolutionary, with diverse types of action finding its place. As such, its aims ranged from removing vending machines from the lunchroom, to organizing protests against teachers and administrators-even seeking the removal of “incompetent staff”.³² During the 1970s, the Negro History Club changed its name to the Afro-American History Club, yet its mission remained the same. Club meetings became increasingly community focused. The Afro-American History Club partnered with the Washington Park YMCA, Nation of Islam, NAACP, selected churches, and other such community organizations that were open and willing cultivating black excellence.³³ 

Members would continue to update a list of demands for the school that pushed for the hiring of more black staff, inclusion of black literature into the curriculum, and other such expectations with the end goal of enhanced educational enrichment at Woodrow Wilson College.³⁴ Leonard Walsh even remembers Bobby Rush visiting Kennedy-King, talking to him about joining something he was helping start up: the Black Panther Party.³⁵ Leonard recalls at the time, he didn’t quite understand the gravity of such a visit, but it made its impact nonetheless, because visits like that were one of many. Thus, many of these efforts naturally slid off campus and into the community, casting Woodrow Wilson as the locus for black empowerment.³⁶ 

For many like Leanord, the college then became “ground zero” for Chicago’s fight for equality and justice.³⁷ The name change itself in the late 1960s was a product of many protests, and symbolic of the structural changes Kennedy-King underwent as it transformed from a college for the people to a college of the people. This becomes more clear when one learns that, for a time in the 1970s, Kennedy-King was the only historically black community college in Illinois.³⁸ As time went on, there were almost “constant meetings” of the Afro-American History Club. Imagining these dedicated black students coming together to support and uplift both themselves and their community is not only inspiring but necessary, especially when considering a post-Sears world where the white shopper is no longer the pinnacle of retail and the white man is no longer held as the sole pinnacle of developed civilization.

 Thus, Kennedy-King became a symbol for the new values that ushered in the death of racialized “high end retail” as well as laid the groundwork for creating a “community anchor” that could weave the fabric of the South Side community together, much like how Sears was the beating heart of the Englewood commercial district. This work of black students and allies in the community is a salient reminder of how losing Sears was an opportunity to usher in a new era, where the imagined dreams of my grandmother belonging could one day become realized. Such dreams gained corporeal form as time marched on. Per the Afro-American Club’s past demands, Kennedy-King revamped their curriculum to integrate more black history and literature into the curriculum, as once originally demanded by the Afro-American History Club. This revitalization of black knowledge was centered around Egyptian symbology, as pictured in the Kennedy King spring semester schedule of 1988 where Thoth, or Jehuti, the Egyptian god of knowledge, science, writing, magic, and art adorns the page.³⁹

Beyond the Map

Throughout my adventure with the past century on 63rd Street, I realized that once Sears left, its absence became the signal marking the end of the gendered and racialized high-end retail as we know it, as well as the dissipation of the surrounding commercial districts that the business was once situated within. While the death of Sears impacted the South Side, leaving 63rd Street commercially barren, it marked the end of the gendered and racialized era of high end retail. This ideological shift existed in tandem with the rise of the Kennedy-King Community College and the black power that accompanied it. The imagined blackness of Sears gained corporeal form through Kennedy-King, therefore preserving the black experiences of Sears yet abolishing the “high end” hierarchy for which it stood. Thus, the changes on 63rd Street reflected not only the effect of losing a Sears, but the larger metanarrative of losing what the Sears brand once stood for–which may not truly be a loss.

All in all, the changes on 63rd Street between Halsted and Union point to a larger ideological and cultural shift, best exemplified by framing Sears as the urban anchor for high-end retail. When the anchor is lifted, the surrounding area’s ties to commerciality become loosened, and the block begins to transform–opening up space for a new foundation for the community. New question emerges: Will a new anchor truly uplift the surrounding area, and attract more resources to the community? Who or what will replace the void Sears has left in the retail industry, and who will be built into that vision? It seems, like all things, the answers to these questions lie in the past.