South of Gotham’s Village, where the streets make no sense and often zigzag into excess, is an unassuming warehouse with two covert doors. It’s down a cobblestoned alley near DiCaprio’s loft and the refurbished corpses of 19th century goth. The only identifying marker on the outside brick is a backlit Atari stick, the last thing patrons see before they get high.
Inside, symbols of defunct culture and artifacts from someone’s forgotten joy. The classic neon signs on display have letters that flicker, some completely deadened, and others just as sound as the years they earned in American towns and kaleidoscope malls. Waldenbooks, KB Toys with its life-sized Buckingham guard, Things Remembered, once-futuristic Brookstone products, a Mario brother statue leaping over a sliding goomba. A jockey is playing Rick Astley from across a Rubik’s Cube (unsolved) bar that offers a spiked slate of options: Stefan Urkel’s Cool Juice, The Carrie Bradshaw, Ecto Coolers with an orange peel, Flanagan’s Red Eye, or Lecter’s Chianti.
A yellow and blue Blockbuster sign hangs above an encased copy of Titanic that requires two cassettes instead of one. A sapphire flasher for Eckerd, where 25-card baseball packs were sold alongside orange jugs of Valium. An 80s-checkered table light from Pizza Hut, with its frosted red cups and a motley-hued jukebox that flipped the backs and tracks of albums. Life-sized cutouts of Alex Keaton, Buffy Summers, Arnold Jackson, Jess Fletcher and what she wrote, Zack Morris, John Rambo, divorcee Dorothy Zbornak and her trio of widows, Ally, Murphy, Jesse the uncle and Viv the aunt, Theo, Pee Wee, and the mohawked Mr. T, all the exact height of their still-conscious or long-gone replicas.
They are treasures ignored in the careless rush to close or sold by disgruntled workers to the first and only bidder. Other keepsakes show up in junkyards, eBay algorithms, estate emptying, abandoned warehouses, thrift shops, or littered near train tracks.
With cherubic glows, customers chase the hidden figure in the Magic Eye frame and flip through the book of postage stamp-sized McDonald’s Monopoly pieces, all the originals except the elusive peel-to-play Boardwalk. Also there, soda glasses featuring the silhouettes of Grimace, the red-booted clown, and the barely disguised Hamburglar in jailhouse stripes. The sign for Camelot Music, versatile enough to have once offered both the greatest of The Monkees alongside their return into the Pool as 40-somethings minus Mike. Faded cotton tees from Gadzooks, the rebel home for prints of tie-dye and the flesh of starlets. The “R” missing its Toys and Us reminds clients of the deafening bolt of tunnel wind between the automatic doors and the portal to ecstasy. Scattered throughout the venue: a Lite-Brite, an Easy-Bake, a slew of Pogs, Creepy Crawlers, TV Guide mags and Bop rags, a Ruxpin and a Cabbage Patch, scented #2’s, Trapper Keepers, Ring Pops, mood rings, and bracelets that only wrap by slap. A giant Moonman, from an era when hits required a video and request line. Three bulbed theater billboards advertise the Ghostbusters sequel, The Last Crusade, and the Nicholson/Keaton double-billing — all from a single summer month. A Tower Records sign, above the six-foot tall cover art of Throwing Cooper, teasing its April arrival. Dreamers flick a Jurassic Park pinball, dings for the Raptors and roars for the Rex. Others huddle around a relic Apple II to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail or avoid a path of urban descent in Sim City.
The items are valued by a generation that grew up slow but was forced to age fast, the only lot to have bridged the unplugged and the dependent decades before the modern wounds of progress.
When we were stupid and contagious.