The Sears, Roebuck & Co. store was built on East 15th Street in 1925 on 13 1/2 acres of ground purchased from the Foster Lumber Company. Eight months after construction began, the mail order house, costing $4 million, was in operation. A story in The Star of July 5, 1925, reported: No other single unit structure as large as the Kansas City mail order house has ever been erected in an equal period of time, construction men of wide experience agree. Just how vast is the plant, whose site extends from Askew to Cleveland and 15th to 17th streets, four square blocks in all, is difficult to convey. Its tiers of floors comprise in all 38 acres of usable working space, or more than 1,700,000 square feet. Sears Roebuck & Co. wrote into the contract it gave the B-W Construction Company the fact the Kansas City plant would be worth $1,000 a day in the fall seasonal rush. For each day the plant was competed before Sept. 15, 1925, the building company received a $1,000 bonus. Had the construction company failed to meet the completion date it would have paid at the same rate for each day of delay. Three thousand men worked on the job in a single day. Herbert V. Jones, realtor, conducted the sale of the land for the plant and J. K. Thompson was general superintendent of the job for the construction company. Old-timers remember the site of the store as a gypsy encampment ground. Traveling circuses also used the grounds annually. The promotional post card was kept in the scrapbook of a Liberty, Mo., woman from the time of the store's opening. Kansas City Times, March 1, 1975.
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