An interesting story today, Aug. 18, in The Brooklyn Paper, regarding the viability of the antiques trade on Atlantic Avenue, once the favorite place to go for antiques not only in New York City’s favorite borough, but perhaps in all of the city’s eight boroughs put together. In the 1980s you could go down to Atlantic Avenue and find an amazing mix of antiques from all era – Victorian to Modern – in more than 40 different shops. Today, however, only about a dozen remain, and there’s no telling how long they’ll last.

My mentor in the antiques business, one Harold Hanson – affectionately known to any lucky enough to be his friend as "Uncle Harold" – was one of those that had a shop on Atlantic Avenue in the 1980s, after fleeing Wall Street. Many were the afternoons that he would sit and talk about his shop, and about all the great antiques he was able to buy and sell all along what is now possibly the hippest neighborhood outside of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Those days are gone, however, as evidenced by much more than the article in The Brooklyn Paper, but I like the writing and the tone of this article because it’s honest, and the dealers that the writer interviews give a straightforward assessment of the changing times along the strip.

Almost all the dealers interviewed cite the Internet as a major factor in the downturn and eventual extinction of the antiques shop on Atlantic, and many are talking about how the stagnant economy, even in NYC, is affecting the buying habits of people. There’s also the easy availability of chic Modern furnishing at easier to afford prices – Ikea anyone? – and the fact that the owners of those million-dollar brownstones, even if they spend on the houses, are not putting out for the furnishings. And if they are, how many $12,000 bedroom suites or oak tables are the going to buy?

It’s sad to think of, especially since Atlantic Avenue represents such an important part of the 1970s and 1980s boom that made so many of the names in the business that populate influential programs like the Roadshow and its ilk. As the article concludes, and rightly so, change is the nature of things, even if that thing happens to be a business about things that haven’t changed in centuries, which gives them their value.

Here’s a link to the article. It’s worth a few minutes to check out.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 20, 2008