The Sears that looks like it's wrapped in cardboard

The Sign: When Hurricane Ike ripped across Houston, it took a piece of the metal exterior covering the façade of the Midtown Sears on Main Street. The metal had been added to the building in 1960s. It's called slipcovering, when a building's exterior is essentially just tucked beneath a new façade. In this case, it's a metal sheet that makes the whole building look as if had been wrapped in corrugated cardboard.

But for a moment, in the wake of a terrible storm, a glimpse of the Sears That Was exposed itself. Jim Parsons, of Preservation Houston, and his colleagues David Bush and Madeleine McDermott Hamm had written a book about Houston's many Art Deco treasures. Though you wouldn't know it by looking at it today, the Sears on Main was one of those treasures — and one of the few remaining.

So when Parsons saw the metal torn away and a shadow of the slim 1930s font that once conveyed the store's glamorous identity to customers at the old entrance facing Main Street, he took a photo. The faintest whisper of an "A" is visible.

In a poetry only Houston could provide, a devastating storm undid a moment of modernization to reveal something far grander.

Slipcovering wasn't uncommon in the '60s, according to Parsons and Bush. Many other Houston buildings suffered the same fate. "I think they honestly thought it would look better," said Parsons.

When the new, metallic thing was unveiled, Sears took out an ad. "It said, 'The all new Sears,'" said Bush. Sears had also bricked in a near continuous row of display windows on the first floor. Some people have said it was out of security concerns, as other cities rioted after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But Parsons said, many buildings did it in a genuine effort to "update"; in the '60s, a Victorian or Art Deco façade seemed drab and old. But the building's old façade often survived intact underneath the new skin, entombed in a casket of progress.

The Place: When the Sears opened in 1939, it was to great fanfare. The area around it was still largely residential. Most other department stores were located farther north, near the courthouse. This was to be a different kind of shopping experience. "It was supposed to be a model for the rest of the country," explained Bush. It was Houston's first store with zoned color schemes, a concept that Sears invented. The women's and children's departments were pink and turquoise; the men's was mustard and brown.

Often cited as the first building to employ escalators in Texas, it wasn't quite that, but it was the first to connect all of its floors via escalator. The Chronicle even published a guide instructing readers how to ride the moving stairs.

Today, visitors can still enjoy the escalators, though the originals were replaced years ago. On a recent Sunday, the speakers emitted a faint pop song, but mostly shoppers browse to the hum of the escalator. It's calm. Far calmer than the aggressively hip stores of the Galleria.

Families go from section to section. There's something for everyone. At the top of the escalator a boy presses his hands on either side of the rotating black bands. A loud squeal comes from his palms, and he giggles to hear it. His sister smacks him on the head before taking her place on the escalator. His brother promptly does the same.

Of course, one person's calm vibe is another's moribund store. Casual observers sometimes don't realize that this Sears is even open. As Jackie C wrote in 2014 Yelp review of the location. "WAIT, this place is open? I live right around the corner and have been making bets that its closed."

But the Sears endures, just as it has endured most of South Main's upheavals. Once the city's premier suburban shopping district, the street was surpassed first by Gulfgate Mall, then Sharpstown Mall. A highway came slicing through the neighborhood, and things changed. Not far from transit hubs like the Greyhound station, but far enough from the buzz of downtown, the area now houses many homeless services. Those organizations and the people they serve are now neighbors with a light rail line and luxury apartments.

"For the homelesss," said Thao Costis, president of SEARCH Homeless Services, "it's never welcoming." But with the development downtown, many of the city's homeless have been shuffled from spot to spot, and the area around the Sears — which includes a large parking lot between the store, a Fiesta grocerty store, and a park on the other side of the building — is perhaps a bit more tolerant.

Still, there's been pushback as the neighborhood changes. SEARCH has had to change how it does intake: What was once a day shelter where folks would line up each morning for food has shifted to more appointment-based casework. Costis said her goals often aren't that different from her new neighbors: Both want to get people off the streets.

"I know that area around Sears is a challenge," she said. But the Sears serves an important role in the community. "We send our clients down there to get work boots and work clothes." Without it, said Costis, "Where would I send them?" And the Fiesta is a critical store for the broader Third Ward, a food desert just across the highway.

With all the changes coming to Midtown, Costis said her organization is actually relocating, taking advantage of rising property values to sell. After a years-long search for property, SEARCH plans to move near Minute Maid Park.

The Sears, though, appears to be staying. The land is owned by Rice Management Company and the store has a long-term lease, the terms of which the company won't disclose. The store also has no plans to restore any of the building's original details, including murals by Eugene Montgomery depicting scenes from Texas history, which have been almost entirely painted over inside. All that remains is the head of Sam Houston, which has a fake frame placed around it.

"This is a really good building," said Bush. "It's late Deco, so it's not that really ornate, zigzag thing. But it's got really good proportions, really good detailing and it's one of the few we have left. When we were doing the book, it was like we would take a picture of a building, and two weeks later it was gone." The Sears, he said, is "what we have, so it's important."

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