Standing on Shoe House Road in Hellam Township, just outside York, Pennsylvania, sits a house built in the shape of a work boot.
It opened in 1949 as an advertisement. Mahlon Haines ran 50 shoe stores and called himself the Shoe Wizard. He wanted the boot read from a passing car.
The chain went to his employees in 1960, and the house followed two years later. They sold it in 1964. Tours and ice cream carried it through most of the next six decades, until public touring ended in the summer of 2022.
Today the house is a short-term rental. Groups of up to six book the whole boot. Pennsylvania dedicated a state historical marker at the site in July 2023, and nobody who isn't booked goes inside.
The Haines Shoe House began with a real boot
In 1948 a York shoe merchant handed an architect a work boot and asked for a house in that shape. Frederick Rempp drew it.
The Haines Shoe House still sits at 197 Shoe House Road in Hellam Township, York County, Pennsylvania, just outside the city of York.
Underneath it's an ordinary wood frame, wrapped in wire lath and cement stucco.
Troweled into a boot, the house runs 48 feet from heel to toe, 17 feet across, and 25 feet high, with 1,500 square feet divided among five staggered levels.
The outside decided the inside. Living room in the broad toe, kitchen in the heel, bedrooms climbing the ankle, garage tucked into the instep.
It cost $26,000, a serious sum for a small house in 1948.
A $127 shoe order and 50 stores
Haines came to York in 1905 at 30. His first venture failed inside two years.
He restarted with a $127 consignment of shoes from the D. S. Peterman Company and built a chain on bargain shoes and loud advertising: 30 stores by 1922, 50 by 1935, across Pennsylvania and into northern Maryland.
He advertised as the Shoe Wizard, and he spent real money doing it.
In September 1938, to mark his 33rd year in York, he financed a week of free public events around York, including skating, dances, and fireworks at Haines Park.
A house shaped like his product worked the same way at a bigger scale: an advertisement a driver could read at speed.
Why it sits back from the road
Haines had the house set back from the pavement on purpose.
A building standing right at the edge of the highway, he thought, would be taken for a gas station. Out on the grass it could only be one thing.
The road it faced was the Lincoln Highway, dedicated in 1913 as the country's first transcontinental automobile route.
Pennsylvania classifies the result as programmatic architecture, the term for a building put up in the shape of the thing it advertises.
The advertising went all the way down to the glass.
Shoe motifs appear in several windows, and the front door shows Haines himself holding a pair of shoes above the words "Haines the Shoe Wizard."
A shoe-shaped doghouse sits in the yard.
Free vacations for 38 York County couples
In December 1948, Haines announced what the house was for. He would host 38 older couples over the coming year, one couple at a time.
The house formally opened on March 5, 1949, his 74th birthday.
City aldermen and borough burgesses chose who went. John F. and Liza Baum of Loganville had been first.
Winners got more than a key. The refrigerator came stocked with meat and dairy from Haines' own farm operations.
Staff lived on the premises and cooked. A small car was available for trips and church.
The house had a radio and a television, when a television was still rare. One day of the stay was set aside for friends and relatives.
Other York businesses supplied the wardrobe. Gregory's dressed the man, and Murphy's Department Store dressed the woman.
In 1950 he extended the prize to newlyweds, and by the mid-1950s anyone could rent the place outright.
Tours, ice cream, and a foreclosure
In 1960 Haines handed his shoe business to 28 key employees.
Two years later the Shoe House went to them as well, and in 1964 they sold it to a dentist.
For two decades after that, the pattern was tours and ice cream. Drivers pulled off, walked through the rooms, and bought ice cream.
There were short stretches as a private home and an antiques store. Fire escapes were added in the 1960s.
By the 1980s, the upkeep had fallen behind.
Curved stucco, windows set into a boot, and five cramped levels cost more to maintain than a square house of the same size.
Haines' granddaughter Annie Haines Keller bought it on May 26, 1987, for $67,500 and started renovating.
The visitors kept coming. The upkeep still outran her budget, and in 1995 the bank took the property back through foreclosure.
The bypass arrives at the windows
Charles and Ruth Miller bought the house on May 17, 1995, for $80,000 and ran it themselves, Ruth giving the tours for about eight years.
By the summer of 2003, she was 77 and he was 75, and they wanted to travel.
They asked $129,000 and closed at $127,000 that September with Carleen and Ronald Farabaugh, who kept the tours and the ice cream going and put the takings back into the building.
The best exterior work of those years was free.
In 2007, Hampton Hotels' Save-A-Landmark program sent 15 volunteers and $20,000 in donated supplies to repaint the stucco boot and its fence.
Television came around too: The Amazing Race in 2005, HGTV's What's With That House in 2007.
The road, meanwhile, had closed in.
The old Lincoln Highway alignment stayed put as Route 462, while a newer Route 30 bypass carried faster traffic right past the windows.
A museum in the toe, then guests again
The couple who bought the house on March 3, 2015, for $160,000 reopened it as three businesses at once.
Ice cream and baked goods in the old garage downstairs, souvenirs at the counter, and a guided tour upstairs for $5.
Furniture came from flea markets, matched against old photographs so the guest rooms looked as they had in the late 1940s.
Water got into the toe in 2018, which meant repairs and another repaint.
Public tours stopped in the summer of 2022, and on August 1 the property sold for $335,000.
The new owners put in four months and $75,000, and by November the Shoe House was taking overnight bookings into the following spring.
Pennsylvania dedicated a state historical marker at the site on July 19, 2023.
Six guests can rent the whole boot now, three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, hot tub and firepit in the yard.
The stairs are narrow and steep, with no way around them. The bypass is loud enough that the owners keep earplugs on hand.
Anyone who isn't booked stays outside and takes the picture from the road.
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