ATTIC SHOPS

Evening Star, Issue 20136, 28 March 1929, Page 14

ATTIC SHOPS

CURIOSITIES OF HEW YORK Amid tlie bustle of New York there survives a species of tumble-jumble shops which might be classified as modern “Old Curiosity Shops.” These stores are not the splendid antique salons that flank our most select streets and avenues (says the New York ‘Times’). Instead they arc the humble huy-everything-aud-sell-every-tbing stores —the real attics of atticless New York. Within their far too limited domains these shops embrace all the varieties of articles which arc usually associated with family attics. Bowlegged clocks of tarnished bronze vie for honour with gaudy prints of speckled aspect; dusty Chinese fans stand upright in noseless pitchers; battered coins of all ages spot out of fat orange-coloured wallets; aquariums, doomed to be for ever fisnle.ss (due to spreading cracks), balance themselves precariously on ton cl brass umbrella stands; gas lamps that wero splendid taro decades ago stand tinsily atop tales of_ miscellaneous' books ; cheap reproductions of Bennington dogs and Wedgwood medallions stare from the depths of yellowish corner cabinets. Time and progress appeal' to have stamped each article as out of date and useless; and yet the shops live—evbn do a thriving business. The lure for that which is out of the ordinary, the necessity for some fixture which 'is not manufactured to-day, the desire for cheap imitations of classical objects give the curiosity shop its excuse for existing; and that fickle New York which refuses to keep what is oldfashioned and then is willing to purchase what is “odd” keeps it in business as well as in stock.