Sears Houses of Massapequa Park, New York

Like many kit house hunters, we scour the Internet looking for leads for locations of Sears houses. During one Google search, this article about the Sears houses of the Village of Massapequa Park, New York popped up in the results. The most intriguing part of the article was this:

"One of the largest single sales, according to Sears records, was 100 homes to a developer in East Massapequa, N.Y., which was incorporated as Massapequa Park in 1931. In the Lomeles' neighborhood, there are dozens of homes that were bought in the 1920s from the Sears Modern Homes Department."

Sears Lexington model on the cover of the Sears Modern Homes catalog

Image courtesy of Archive.org

One hundred Sears homes! If true, that would be quite a find. Of course, we now know better than to get too excited by claims of lots of Sears houses. Large concentrations of kit houses are few and far between with the largest single sales order for Sears being the purchase of almost 200 Sears houses by the Standard Oil company in 1918. Most of the homes purchased by Standard Oil were constructed in the Standard Addition in Carlinville, Illinois, where most of the homes still stand today.

Even if the order for Massapequa Park had not been for 100 homes, it sounded as if there were still dozens of Sears homes in the Village. Surely, a collection of that many Sears homes in a community of a little over 2 miles in size on southern Long Island would have been documented somewhere? Or some other kit house blogger would have highlighted all of the Sears houses to be found in Massapequa Park? Nope. Nothing. I couldn't find a thing online documenting the Sears houses in Massapequa Park locally or by any of the big names in the kit house world.

The thing is, there really are a lot of Sears houses in Massapequa Park! One of the streets mentioned in the article - Grand Boulevard - has over a dozen Sears houses including several of the largest models that Sears offered. I know some of my fellow kit house hunters have looked because I found most of the Sears houses on Grand Boulevard on the list of Sears houses across the United States. But from what I've been able to find online, no one has documented all of the possible Sears houses in Massapequa Park.

What follows is my attempt to do a basic list of potential Sears houses in the Village. It's entirely based on what I can see from online map services and from some online resources that provide some basic information about the houses. I'm hoping that someone locally will take the list and do some additional research to help confirm and authenticate my identification of the Sears houses. This will be a simple list which I can revisit in the future as I get more information.

• Grand Boulevard
• Pacific Street
• Tyrconnell Avenue
• Glengariff Road
• More Sears Houses (Second Avenue, Charles Avenue, Pacific Street)

History of Sears Houses in Massapequa Park

When I first started this page, I didn't have a lot of information about the Sears houses in Massapequa Park, just that they were there. As I've done more research, I've been able to fill in the backstory on most all of the Sears houses that we've located. These posts help to explain some of the history related to those homes. 

• The Early Sears Houses of Massapequa Park: History related to the 1920s Sears houses built north of the Long Island Railroad.
• Massapequa Park Mystery Solved?: A possible explanation for the story of "100 Sears houses".