History

Sears, Roebuck and Company began its transformation from a catalog-only retailer into a national chain of physical stores in the 1920s, and the architectural program that accompanied this expansion was one of the most sustained corporate building campaigns in American history. George C. Nimmons had developed the standard Sears store design through the 1910s and 1920s, producing a series of large-format brick-and-concrete buildings that applied the most commercially credible architectural vocabulary of each period to stores designed for efficiency, durability, and brand recognition. By the late 1920s, that vocabulary had become Art Deco, and the Nimmons, Carr & Wright firm—which took over Sears’s store program as the company scaled its expansion—produced the Louisville store in 1928 as one of a generation of Sears buildings that brought the Art Deco idiom to American commercial architecture at a retail scale rather than a skyscraper scale.

The Louisville store opened at 800 West Broadway in 1928, serving the growing residential and commercial neighborhoods along that corridor. The 1946 expansion updated the facility for the postwar retail environment, adding floor space while preserving the 1928 Art Deco character of the principal facade. The NRHP listing in 1983 recognized the building as an important example of the corporate-sponsored Art Deco retail architecture of the late 1920s, at a moment when preservation attention to commercial and industrial buildings of this type was just beginning to be extended to the Sears building program.