I often drive the scenic route from St. Louis Park to the State Capitol in St. Paul, east on Lake Street past the old Sears building, over the river to University Avenue, then through the Midway District and past the former site of Montgomery Ward distribution center.
Aaron Montgomery Ward was a Chicago kid who opened his first mail-order house there in 1872. By associating his business with the non-profit National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, Ward offered rural customers more choices and lower prices than generally available in rural towns.
Richard Warren Sears was a Stewartville, MN kid who worked for a Granger railroad, the Minneapolis & St. Louis. As station agent In rural North Redwood, he parlayed a refused shipment of watches into a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886. There he met watch-repair-whiz Alvah Curtis Roebuck, and they joined up and decamped to Chicago.
Over the next century, Chicago’s Wards and Sears grew into behemoths that dominated the selling and shipping of dry goods to everyone, everywhere.
In 1921, Montgomery Ward built a massive 9-story warehouse and distribution center anchored by a 245-foot tower on University Avenue near Snelling in St. Paul. Sears followed suit in 1928 with its own gigantic pile featuring a shorter tower on East Lake Street in Minneapolis. Both million-square-foot buildings used a robust mushroom column, concrete-flat-slab structural system pioneered by Minneapolis engineer Claude A. P. Turner around 1909.
After World War II, both companies had outlived their business models and slowly headed down. The Sears store on Lake Street closed in 1994; the University Avenue Wards store shut down about the same time. Chicago developer Patrick Daly had his eyes on both sites, proposing Daly-double-demolitions followed by suburban-style retail with acres of surface parking.
A mix of community effort, preservation persistence, and maybe a dose of fairy dust saved the Sears building; its lovingly recycled hulk reopened in 2006 as the Midtown Exchange, now home to the Midtown Global Market, Allina Hospitals offices, a hotel, plus a mix of high-end and affordable housing.
Perhaps due to a shortage of preservation fairy dust across the river, the Montgomery Ward building was dynamited to rubble in 1996, supplanted by a Daly-dismal, big-box retail mess clad in that anti-concrete, fluffy EIFS, (Exterior Insulation and Finish System), anchored by a cheesy, crude, and unforgivably stubby plastic replica of Wards’ original 245-foot tower.
Sears and Wards. It was the best of times; it was the worst of crimes.
