The last remaining Sears store in the Dallas/Fort Worth area — located at Town East Mall in Mesquite — closes in April. The first Sears store in Dallas was in Oak Cliff.
Sears, Roebuck and Co. is nearly 130 years old. It started as a mail-order company in Illinois in 1892, and the Sears headquarters and warehouse for North Texas was built in the early 1900s on Lamar Boulevard in the building now called Southside on Lamar.
The first Sears retail store opened in Chicago in 1925. The first Dallas Sears retail store opened in 1928 at 303 W. Jefferson Boulevard on the ground floor of what is now Jefferson Tower.
For almost 50 years, Jefferson Boulevard was synonymous with Sears.The retailer operated at that location for about 20 years before building a three-story department store on Jefferson at Llewellyn in 1948.
It was virtually identical to a store Sears built on Greenville Avenue the same year.
Back then, if Sears didn’t have it, perhaps it didn’t exist. You could buy clothes, shoes, tires, tools, bikes, paint, hardware, lawnmowers, saddles and bridles, live chicks, sewing supplies, toiletries, sporting goods, furniture, wedding dresses, wedding rings, coffee makers and baby stuff. Plus, you could fill a prescription in the drug store and eat lunch at the snack bar.
People who grew up in Oak Cliff in the mid-1900s remember having their photo taken with Santa in the basement and recall the spectacular Christmas windows unveiled dramatically on Dec. 1 every year. We also bought school clothes there, savoredthe nut bar that made the whole store smell of roasted nuts, and stopped by the famous candy counter.
The U-shaped candy counter featured cabinets full of candy sold by weight, with a cashier stationed inthe middle.
Students at Reagan Elementary walked to the storeafter school just to ride the escalator, the first many in that generation had seen.Sears moved to Red Bird Mall in the mid-1970s, and Rick’s Furniture moved into the building for a few years before it was demolished. Fiesta Mart was built on the site in the late 1990s.
