A store builds itself a town
On a hot August morning in 1955, Sears, Roebuck and Co. cut the ribbon on something new at the corner of Federal Highway and Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It wasn't just another department store. Around a roughly 60,000‑square‑foot Sears and its auto shop, the company assembled an entire open‑air plaza: a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, a five‑and‑dime, a drug store, a jeweler, a barber, a beauty salon, an optometrist, a sandwich shop — and a parking lot with room for about 600 cars.
They called it Sears Town (often written Searstown), and it was the first complete shopping center in the area — the strip mall arriving in a region that had never seen one. Locals used it as a landmark to give directions by. For a booming postwar suburb, one address suddenly covered the groceries, the haircut, the new tires, and the Kenmore washer.
Everything on one parking lot
Sears Town was a deliberate prototype, not a one‑off. The target was a specific kind of American city: roughly 50,000–60,000 residents, underserved by big retail, whose shoppers were driving hours to larger markets for major purchases. Sears could arrive, open a moderately sized full‑line store with a supporting cast of tenants, and instantly become the biggest name in town.
- Sears, Roebuck and Co.The anchor
- Auto Service CenterTires & batteries
- SupermarketPiggly Wiggly · Publix · Pantry Pride
- Five & DimeWoolworth · Grant City
- Drug StoreEckerd & friends
- Local ShopsBarber · salon · jeweler · lunch counter
- Free ParkingHundreds of spaces
Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back
Where the sign went up
After Fort Lauderdale and a 1956 follow‑up in West Palm Beach, the idea sat mostly dormant for years. Then, between 1963 and 1968, Sears revived it in earnest and opened roughly ten Sears Town centers across the East — in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and a string of mid‑size Florida markets.
-
1955
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
The original, opened August 19, 1955 at 901 N. Federal Highway — the first center of its kind in the South and the prototype for everything that followed.
Operated 65+ years · slated for redevelopment -
1956
West Palm Beach, Florida
The second Sears Town opened in November 1956. Afterward, the concept went quiet while the industry's attention drifted toward bigger regional centers.
Concept dormant until 1963 -
1963
Cumberland, Maryland
The revival begins. Cumberland's Sears Town anchored the small mountain city until the Sears store decamped for the newly built Country Club Mall in nearby LaVale after 1981 — a preview of the pattern that would end the format.
Sears left for a mall -
1965
Key West, Florida
Civic and business leaders lobbied Sears to take a chance on the remote island, where residents drove hours to Miami for big purchases. Searstown Plaza became Key West's first shopping center, its signature sign overlooking the water. The Sears store held on for about 55 years before closing in 2020.
Sears closed 2020 · plaza survives -
1966
Titusville, Florida
A 285,000‑square‑foot Searstown Mall built for a Space Coast city booming at the height of the Apollo program, anchored by Sears, Woolworth, Publix, and Eckerd Drugs. Sears closed in 2018; the renamed Titusville Mall has since been targeted for demolition and a large mixed‑use redevelopment.
Renamed · facing demolition -
1967
Leominster, Massachusetts
Searstown Mall brought the name to New England as an enclosed center off Route 2. It carried the Searstown name for nearly four decades before a 2004 renovation rebranded it The Mall at Whitney Field; its Sears anchor later went dark.
Renamed 2004 · still operating -
1968
Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey
Opened as an open‑air Searstown with Sears, Grant City, and a Pantry Pride supermarket. Enclosed and expanded in the early 1970s as the Shore Mall, it was later partially demolished and reborn in 2013 as Harbor Square — the name changing with each era, as it did nearly everywhere.
Twice renamed · partially demolished
Two good decades
Most Sears Towns thrived for roughly twenty years. Their compact footprint — the very thing that made them cheap to build in modest markets — left little room to grow. When enclosed regional malls opened nearby, Sears itself usually moved into them, abandoning the anchor position at its own centers. Once the anchor left, the Sears Town name typically came down with it.
There's an argument that the format reflected a larger strategic miss: while competitors raced into enclosed mall development in the early 1960s, Sears spent much of the decade building small centers in small markets, only committing seriously to malls in the late 1960s. The company that had pioneered suburban, park‑in‑front retail was late to the format that would define the next thirty years.
The long corporate decline finished the job. As Sears contracted through the 2000s and entered bankruptcy in 2018, the surviving Sears Town anchors closed one by one — Titusville in 2018, Key West in 2020 — and the centers around them were renamed, redeveloped, or razed.
Last one standing
When Key West's Sears closed in 2020, Fort Lauderdale's original 1955 center became the last one still wearing the name — a sun‑faded time capsule at a prime intersection. Its days are numbered too: approved plans would replace Searstown with apartment towers, a hotel, and new commercial space at 901 North Federal.
Seven decades after a mayor scissored the ribbon in front of an excited crowd, the first Sears Town built will very likely be the last one to fall. What it pioneered, though, never went away: nearly every errand run to a strip center with an anchor store, a grocery, a nail salon, and a sea of free parking traces its family tree back to that corner of Federal and Sunrise.