Sears and the Demise of Middle-Class San Francisco

Few retail industry experts were surprised by Sears’ bankruptcy filing last month. Once America’s leading retailer, the 125-year-old business has been in steep decline lately, taking on unsustainable debt and shuttering underperforming stores. In the main, Sears’ decline is a parable – a familiar one for a while now -- of the fate of brick-and-mortar stores in the age of Amazon. But, in San Francisco, the decline of Sears is also a window into the lost era of middle-class San Francisco.

Sears was a major institution in San Francisco since it opened its flagship store at Army (Cesar Chavez Street since 1995) and Mission in 1929. “We feel sure that our entry into San Francisco,” Sears boasted in a full-page advertisement in the San Francisco Call, “will be welcomed in the friendly spirit always manifested by one of the greatest cities in the world.” And, indeed, it was: Sears soon became the commercial hub of the Mission District, employing about 250 full time, unionized, workers. But in 1975, the Mission Sears closed its doors. The store had been roiled by an eight-month strike, but there was more going on beneath the surface, as a Sears spokesman told the New York Times: “We weren’t competitive here with the convenient suburban malls.” Indeed, the expansion of suburbs in the East and South Bay challenged San Francisco’s regional retail dominance, and the Mission Sears paid the price. Furthermore, the largescale movement of generally-low income Latin American immigrants into the Mission significantly diminished local purchasing power.

Sears, Roebuck & Company, Geary Boulevard and Masonic Avenue, August 1964. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. 

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s second Sears lumbered onward. Opened in 1951 at Geary and Masonic in the Anza Vista neighborhood, it quickly became Northern California’s biggest Sears. It outlived the Mission store by fifteen years but in 1990, it closed because of sluggish sales and the high cost of essential building maintenance. The closures of both stores resulted in the loss of about 500 blue collar jobs in San Francisco.

But more broadly, the closure of those stores represented the end of an era in San Francisco in which a significant proportion of San Franciscans still worked with their hands, and in which few product names commanded more respect than Craftsman, first launched by Sears in 1927. Known principally for its American-made ratchets, wrenches, and sockets, Craftsman became a household name in households where manual work prevailed. The American steel used by Craftsmen compared favorably to the “soft steel” used by many Chinese tool makers beginning in the late 1980s which was infamous for its weakness.

I was born in 1972, at the tail end of this era, and raised in a small rent-controlled apartment in the Sunset District, where my mother still lives. The Sears at Masonic was important to my family, and not just because of the Icee’s and popcorn that my father would occasionally buy me. It was important because that is where you bought the best tools to get the job done. In 1990, just as the Masonic store was closing, my father and I built a roof rack for our 1983 Toyota Tercel in order to cart my luggage off to freshman year at UC Davis. We used Craftsman sockets, 1 x 4 boards from the local lumber company (long since replaced by a condominium complex), and we changed the oil and filter ourselves with a Craftsman wrench. 

Sears, Roebuck & Company Store, Army and Mission Streets. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. 

Since 2010, most Craftsman tools have been manufactured in China and Taiwan. Happily, the brand has retained it famous durability as Chinese manufacturing has improved, and today Craftsman remains the official tool of NASCAR and the DIY Network. When my father died in 2016, I inherited his Craftsman tools and I am teaching my own son and daughter to use them properly, even though they will not likely need them to prosper. For as many services are now available at the touch of an app, there is still a virtue in knowing how to fix a thing yourself.
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Written by Josh Sides, Editor of California History.

Engaging Local Youth Through Exquisite Mural Project

During the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, public murals became an essential form of artist response and public voice. They were a means of challenging the status quo and expressing both pride and frustration during a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican American community. Because they threatened established authority, Chicana/o murals were often censored, neglected, whitewashed, or destroyed

As part of the current exhibition ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, the California Historical Society created a program to engage youth, many of Latino heritage, who live and go to school in the Mission District of San Francisco, an area renowned for its murals. We named the program Exquisite Mural after the old parlor game “exquisite corpse,” in which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled.

Over the course of the program, roughly 200 students from Jamestown Community Center and Mission Community Beacon joined us in our gallery to take part in the project.

Before the children participated in the Exquisite Mural Project, I lead them on a tour of the gallery and discussed three of the mural artists featured in the exhibition. The kids have shown an incredible amount of empathy for the artists, asking multiple times “Why did they have to paint over the mural? Why did they have to destroy the mural?” The children are also very keen on knowing if the muralists were still alive and were fascinated when told that I had met a few of them. Some of the kids were able to meet muralist Ernesto de la Loza, who led a personal tour of his section of the exhibition and stayed to participate in the mural making activity.

Resurrection of the Green Planet by Ernesto de la Loza

In our version of the game, a mini mural is created collaboratively as a triptych, which basically means a three-part picture. A child would complete the first panel of the picture, then, two mural artists, one from Los Angeles and one from San Francisco, each drew on one of the remaining two panels. The person drawing did not know what the person before them had created due to the paper being folded, rendering the other images hidden. I explained to the kids that they might treat the Exquisite Mural as a concept drawing that they could use to build on if they were to paint a full-scale mural.

Using stories as a backdrop, the youth explored themes raised by the exhibition and its featured mural artists such as displacement, activism, immigration, cultural heritage, racism, memory, feminism, and censorship. The art created by the kids embodied similar ideas with many of the kids expressing pride towards their heritage by painting the flags of countries from where they or their families are from. Much of the art included imagery of peace, unity, and friendship.

The most fulfilling thing about this project was seeing the kids who were initially adamant about “not being able to draw” or saw themselves as “not artists” come up with really creative pieces of art inspired by iconography that they saw in the gallery. Some spoke with me about how they were used to seeing the Virgen de Guadalupe at home. Mermaids and dinosaurs were other popular subjects that resonated with the group. These conversations were a great opportunity to help the kids understand that anybody can be an artist and that each muralist they had learned about were once kids themselves.

The Exquisite Mural art will be showcased in the CHS galleries beginning August 25th. We plan to celebrate the hanging of the murals with the youth participants and their family during an afternoon reception, poetry reading, and discussion with artists of all ages.

by Erik Zuniga, Guest Concierge and Exquisite Mural project group leader