photograph courtesy memphis public libraries
Sears Crosstown as it looked in 1927.
One of America’s greatest retail success stories began in 1886, when a Minnesota railroad station agent, Richard Warren Sears, decided he could sell a box of watches that had been rejected by a local jeweler. Other railroad employees bought them so quickly that he teamed up with a watch repairer, Alvah Curtis Roebuck, and opened a mail-order company, offering customers watches and jewelry.
As their business grew, they added other products, moved Sears, Roebuck & Company to Chicago, and their newspaper advertising evolved into 500-page yearly catalogs. Known to customers as “Wish Books” and carrying the slogan “The Book of Bargains: Money-Savers for Everybody,” these offered merchandise that many rural Americans had never encountered in the cluttery stores where they previously shopped. By the early 1920s, Sears was selling tools, hardware, furniture, clothing, sewing machines, bicycles, musical instruments, toiletries, motorcycles, and Lincoln automobiles. Until the 1940s, Sears even sold houses — by mail.
One innovation often overlooked was Sears’ creation of its own brands, which quickly became household names: Allstate (auto parts), Craftsman (tools), Kenmore (appliances), Silvertone (guitars), and more. Customers simply completed the form in the catalog, or called in their orders, and within weeks, their “wishes” were delivered to their doors. In these days of Amazon and FedEx, it is simply impossible to convey what a marvel this was at the time, and how eagerly Sears customers waited for the next issue of the catalog.
The location of Sears Crosstown, well outside of downtown, was intentional. It separated the complex from other retailers, and unlike the department stores on Main Street, it provided a special convenience for shoppers: off-street parking.
The company became the largest retailer in America, opening a massive warehouse and distribution center in Chicago in 1906. Here merchandise was stocked, orders were filled and shipped, and — for the first time — the ground floor housed a retail store. But even this 40-acre complex couldn’t keep pace with demand, so Sears opened other regional distribution centers across America, in Boston, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Kansas City.
In 1927, decades before Memphis promoted itself as “America’s Distribution Center,” Sears management selected our city to join this prestigious group, erecting the structure on Cleveland (shown here shortly after it opened), to handle orders for a seven-state region. From opening day, it was a beehive of activity. In his book Sears Crosstown in Memphis, author Bill Haltom noted, “Each day, more than 45,000 orders were processed by more than 1,500 workers.”
The location of Sears Crosstown, well outside of downtown, was intentional. It separated the complex from other retailers, and unlike the department stores on Main Street, it provided a special convenience for shoppers: off-street parking. In later years, a parking garage was erected, linked to the main building by a tunnel.
The ground floors served as a spacious retail center, while the upper floors were packed with merchandise available in the “Wish Book.” Clerks processed the orders, and a complex system of chutes and conveyers moved products from floor to floor, and finally outside, to the railroad line that carried purchases to customers’ homes.
For decades, Sears Crosstown was a smooth-running machine, and in Memphis Sears — they eventually dropped “Roebuck & Company” — opened modern retail stores, in the newly opened Laurelwood shopping center, and as anchor stores at several new shopping malls. Over the years, however, customers’ needs changed. Mail order was no longer a novelty, and new competitors like Kmart offered lower prices and different merchandise.
Sears went into a decline. The retail store on Cleveland became an outlet center, but that didn’t save the company. When they stopped printing their giant catalogs in 1993, the Crosstown distribution complex closed. The future of the iconic structure, so well-known here, seemed bleak. After all, other cities had dynamited their dormant Sears catalog centers to make way for new uses, and it was only a matter of time, Memphians feared, before Sears Crosstown shared their fate.
That never happened. As we demonstrate in this issue, entrepreneurs stepped forward to renovate the structure, top to bottom, and — as it approaches its 100th birthday in 2027 — gave it new life as a multipurpose urban village. Much like the old Sears catalogs, Crosstown Concourse today seems to offer something for almost everybody
