Located at 8501 Carnegie Avenue, Cleveland, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) was founded in 1968 and moved into its present location, one of the first Sears stores built in Cleveland, in 1990. The building is part of the Cleveland Play House complex, which was sold to the Cleveland Clinic (in 2009) in anticipation of the Play House's move to Playhouse Square.

Sears Roebuck and Company started out as a mail order business in the 1880s, serving the population as it expanded westward. By the early 1900s the rise of chain stores across the country cut into Sears' catalog sales and the company moved into modern retailing by opening its first store on February 2, 1925 on Chicago's West Side. This began a building boom that would continue until WWII. Nationwide, Sears Roebuck completed the construction of 27 stores in 1927, a figure that ballooned to 319 in 1929. The first two stores in Cleveland - one on the east side and one on the west - opened the same day in August 1929.

The east side store was located at 8501 Carnegie Avenue. Sales spaces were located in the basement, first, and second floors while the third floor was a stock room. Keeping 'in step' with retail store fashion, Sears updated access to their sales floors with Otis Escalators in 1952. The building is constructed of reinforced concrete with yellow brick veneer and sandstone detailing. Much of the sandstone window and door lintels include terrific Art Deco Style 'tree of life' foliage accented with chevrons. The original showroom windows were framed in copper.

Standing 62 feet high, the footprint encompasses 174 feet of frontage on Carnegie and a depth of 178 feet toward Euclid Avenue. Its signature feature is the 31-foot square tower. In 1940, a 52 foot high sympathetic addition was built to the east, whose footprint measures 102-feet wide on Carnegie and a depth of 199 feet. In the mid-1940s a 62x75 Farm Store building was added. A rather spartan one-story 34x65 foot Garden Shop addition was competed in 1954 on the northwestern corner of the structure. In total, the building occupied a quarter million square feet.

Referred to as "Sears Main Store", the building remained essentially unchanged when it was closed in 1980. It was almost immediately purchased by the Cleveland Play House for $1 million. The Playhouse re-imagined the space as the "Production Center", where rehearsal rooms, costumes/props, scenery and the Play House Club were located. Portions of all four floors were leased out to other tenants, the most visible one being the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has leased 25,000 square feet of space in the building since 1990. Now poised to return to its University Circle roots, MOCA has raised nearly $18 million to build a new facility at the corner of Euclid and Mayfield.

The Cleveland Play House has announced plans to move to the Allen Theatre in Playhouse Square, and the Mid-town property, including the Sears building, has been sold to the Cleveland Clinic. Current reports indicate that MOCA will continue to occupy its existing space until December 2011 or June 2012. Will the fate of Cleveland's oldest Sears store building follow that of other nearby Art Deco buildings like the Cleveland School of Podiatric Medicine and perhaps the long-term home of Potter & Mellen/Segelin's Florist? Undoubtedly, the structure's next chapter is uncertain.

And we can't miss the opportunity to mention the very unsettling fact that the Play House complex includes a 1983 addition designed by world-famous architect and Cleveland native Philip Johnson. This very important landmark is the only building in Cleveland designed by Johnson.

Information supplied from Cleveland Restoration Society March 22, 2010 e-newsletter.