EMBRACING TREASURES: THE ART OF SURVIVING

Ten years ago, Our Time Press christened three blocks on Malcolm X Blvd., between Halsey Street and Decatur Street, “Antiques Row.” 

Our Time’s effort and intention was to help MXB antiquarians pick up business from the October 1999 “Come On Home to Bedford-Stuyvesant” Brownstone Tour.  It did.

Within two years, the corridor had extended from Anthony Smith’s Odd Things’ Collectibles at Decatur and MXB to Morton’s Antique Memories at the northwest corner of Putnam Avenue.  Clarence Barber, veteran of them all, and Paul Tyner and Greta Niles, who rented a space inside Tyner’s place, across from Barber’s, enjoyed steady traffic.   

Dalton Taylor’s The Victorian on Tompkins Avenue South, Ken William’s high-end Mercantile on the corner of Fulton Street and Irving, and Eddie Hibbert’s cave of a treasure chest on Myrtle, attracted collectors from all over the city. 

All of the furniture dealers had a common goal: to keep business going, and to prosper.

Now only Mr. “C” survives on the original Antiques Row.  Greta may be in Florida, site of her dream Antiques emporium.  Tyner and Morton have not been heard from, although Morton may be residing nearby. Mr. Smith is retired to stately Savannah, GA, his Odd Things replaced by the high-scale Thompson’s Interiors – hardly a place, now, for stuff. 

Taylor and Hibbert are still around, plying trade amidst salvaged architectural gems, from pier mirrors, painted wood mantles and victor-victrolas to brass hinges, old Ebony and National Geographic magazines, spinster’s diaries and framed photos of high school class pictures of the 50′s, and tons of other bits and pieces.

Business is slow.  “All small businesses are suffering because of the economy,” Taylor told us.  “Nearly 40 antique shops along Atlantic Avenue (site of 1999′s real Antiques Row) have closed their doors for good.  If you can keep the doors from closing, you’re doing OK.”

Plus a lot of folks are accessing their shopping via the Internet and selling their secondhand things for first-class prices on Craig’s List.   But these stalwarts are hanging in there.  Not because they love the business.

The answer to why Taylor, Hibbert and Mr. C are still around walked into The Victorian last week.  She asked to see Taylor’s doors.  Turned out the doors he showed her were too small to fashion a 6-ft dining table out of one of them.   Taylor advised that she visit Eddie Hibbert, where she would find exactly what she wanted. After all, Eddie is the door king.  Particularly antique and old one’s.

“Eddie sends three to four people a day over to my shop,” says Dalton. 

Small businesses are being forced to create commercial alliances to stay afloat. It commands integrity and respect and an understanding that sharing customers is the only way to go.  “It’s a buyers’ market, and people are not buying.”

It doesn’t hurt, either, that Taylor strips furniture, makes repairs, refinishes and executes a range of other artisan skills, including wainscoting and crafting moldings. He knows that in today’s economy, it pays to be multifaceted. 

Mr. C’s been a fixture on the avenue for close to 40 years, and admits that real estate investment and stock market tinkering has a lot more to do with it than the occasional sale of a rare, vintage mahogany mantle or a junked lamp.

Hibbert’s super-rare finds are stored in and sold from an open, easy-access warehouse situation at Greene & Gates, the heart of Clinton Hill’s brownstoner neighborhood.  He oversees the work of a Class A wood-stripping team, and he is known for his almost-uncanny ability to “attract” great pieces of furniture and unusual finds – the kind you see oil-polished in House & Garden.  Or that you used to see in the now-defunct H&G.

In 2001, Mr. Hibbert introduced us to Jomo Oliya, a cabinetmaker who said that antique dealers, “have a soul connection with nature, and with the builders and carpenters of the past.  They hold a piece of wood.  They understand it. They respect it. They know it was shaped from the heart.  They have a special knowledge.”

Mr. Taylor shared “knowledge” about brownstones, the final havens for much of Hibbert, Mr. C’s and Taylor’s objets d’art: “They are extraordinary treasures.  Like living within a work of art. And sometimes people fail to see that the beauty of them also is in the fact that they are always being fixed up, repaired, nurtured; they are living things.  They were made when craftsmanship was king.  They can never be replaced or built ever again.”
(Note:  Please see Our Time Press Business Directory for location and contact information for The Victorian and Eddie’s Treasures.)
- Bernice Elizabeth Green

Community Action Forces Illegal Shelter to Close

Community Board 3, Small Businesses, Residents, Block Presidents Take Back Malcolm X Blvd.

A victory took place in Bedford-Stuyvesant this week. Residents, merchants, civic leaders and elected officials joined forces to express their concerns about a rehabilitation center that covertly moved into the area in the beginning of January. Standing in solidarity, the collective succeeded in forcing the Gelzer Foundation, that ran a temporary housing facility for recovering alcohol and drug addicts, at 332 Malcolm X Blvd. out of the neighborhood.

After a weeklong battle, neighbors were thrilled to learn that the beat-up van that dropped off the wayward clan returned to reclaim the bed frames and mattresses it left behind. Earlier in the month, members of the community met with two representatives from the Gelzer Foundation. Unfortunately, the meeting only raised more questions and suspicions about how this organization, which apparently receives some city funding and holds no certificate with the state, was able to enter a neighborhood undetected.
After the request for a second meeting and documentation of the agency’s legitimacy was declined, the collective swung into action. True to the time in which we live in, there were no picket signs or bull horns demanding justice. Instead, the fight played out in cyberspace with e-mail campaigns fired off at jet speed to elected officials and civic leaders; and numerous blog postings and text messages soliciting support. New York Daily News, Our Time Press, the Real Deal Newspaper and News 12 covered the action; phone calls were placed to the agency, forcing elected officials to take action. By Friday, the Gelzer Foundation had enough and permanently closed its doors.
Program housing is a major concern in Bedford-Stuyvesant and other low-income communities throughout the city. Although the city and state has placed a “fair share clause” which monitors the number of program agencies committed to one region, developers and venture capitalists are able to exploit the lucrative market by secretly setting up such agencies in privately owned homes.
Community Board 3, which meets regularly with several city agencies during its closed-session meetings, promises to address the issue in a public forum soon. Chairman Henry Butler commended Bainbridge Street & Malcolm X Blvd. , Block Association and the Malcolm X Merchants Association for their unwavering commitment in tackling the issue noting that it was the community’s acting in the early stages that made the difference.

View From Here: Why William Thompson for Mayor

Bill Thompson grew up on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Malcolm X Blvd.   The journey from those streets to being elected City Comptroller in 2001, managing a staff of more than 700 with a budget of $68 million and being overwhelmingly reelected in 2005,  is a long one with middle-class struggles, and successes achieved by hard work.  It is a journey that has attuned Comptroller Thompson to the problems that the middle class and middle class aspirants feel every day.  It has also given him the confidence to use the strategy necessary for this mayoral battle.  “The only way to compete with the richest man in New York City is to build from the ground up.  If you’re going to get into a dollar battle, you’re going to lose very quickly.” 

Thompson was speaking at a fund-raiser in the UN Plaza home of Edward Bergman and his family, high above the East River and about as far from Putnam Avenue as you can get. Here, Bill Thompson was speaking about education  and the need to go in a different direction.  “Our young people are being taught to take standardized tests,” he said.  “Our children are not taught critical thinking.  They’re not taught comprehension.  Not taught the skills they will need in the future.  We’re being given a false sense of accomplishment and all it is leading to is that our children are not being taught to compete.” 

Bill Thompson has an empathy with ordinary people that Mayor Bloomberg feels can be achieved by riding the subway four or five times a week.  But the Brooklyn Papers reported that in their interview with the Mayor, they asked about community benefit agreements, such as that signed by Bruce Ratner for the Atlantic Yards Project.  “I’m violently opposed to community benefits agreements,” the mayor replied.   “A small group of people, to feather their own nests, extort money from the developer? That’s just not good government.”    This statement alone disqualifies him as a choice for Mayor of New York City.  Here he is the richest man in New York, oblivious to the irony of his being “violently opposed” to small groups of unemployed Black men, many living pressed in by the explosion of construction in downtown Brooklyn, feathering their public housing nests, by demanding the opportunity to do hard work. 

He accuses them of extortion for insisting that developers of the gilded city rising only blocks away, put aside a portion of contracts and work for local people and companies.  He has $16 billion dollars, but helping someone bring home a paycheck for rent, food and clothing is “not good government.”  His concept of good government would have met with a vigorous nod of approval from Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who, the apocryphal story goes, when told the starving masses had no bread, thought she’d be cute and said, “Let them eat cake.”  True or not, it was 1793 during the French Revolution and the people objected to the haughty attitude and the lady lost her head.  

The mayor’s team seems to have lost their collective heads as well or they must have read something in the polls saying it won’t be a double-digit win, to risk bringing in Rudy Giuliani, the biggest loser in the Republican presidential primaries, and someone anathema to the African-American community, to campaign with the mayor. Giuliani knows as much now as when he snickered at the Republican Convention at the thought of a “community organizer” becoming president.

Rudy’s connecting an election of William Thompson with a probable rise in crime and Bloomberg, frankly dishearteningly, going further, saying that New York can go the way of Detroit if Thompson were elected, was certainly the most offensive local politicking we’ve seen in some time.  Why does a billionaire have to resort to running a morally bankrupt campaign? Maybe it is as former mayor David Dinkins said at the Manhattan fundraiser, they have forgotten the great Negro Baseball League player Satchel Paige’s admonition, “Don’t look back, they may be gaining on you.” 

I don’t know what the calculus is here, perhaps the old tactic of tricking poor whites that they and the plantation owners share a bond, but it is certainly dismissive of the Black vote and those who would rather have the men of the neighborhood going to and from work rather than standing around chronically unemployed.   The mayor’s office has to become centered on the problems of regular working people and those who want to be working, and the city budget has to be used to not only deliver services but to circulate in the communities that need them most, lifting the quality of life for all New Yorkers.  It’s time for the Bloomberg era to come to a close.   Polls open 6am, November 3rd.  Every vote counts.