On the opposite end is Green Village.
Located on Starr Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, just off the Jefferson Street stop on the L train, this warehouse-size junk shop is stacked to the ceiling, and spilling onto the street, with all manner of forgotten and discarded items, many of them in dusty disrepair. The longtime store manager, Sidney Ober, 56, is an affable Hasid who lives nearby in Williamsburg. He runs the shop from a cluttered area by the door, where he can be seen arguing over prices and directing pieces of furniture in and out of moving vans.
Customers pick through long aisles cluttered with goods both mundane and strange. Dressers, telephones, yellowed books, broken chairs, piles of clothing — for $2 a pound — and pots and pans are mixed in with handmade trinkets, high school sports trophies and other items of questionable resale value. (A glass jar labeled “hummus” and indeed lined with desiccated chickpea mush was nestled among used pieces of crockery.) The place stays busy, frequented by bargain-hunters, arbitrageurs and people mostly browsing for novelty’s sake.
On a recent Sunday, Sanjee Abeytunge, 42, and his wife, Bjorg Larson, 33, were scanning the aisles for unique pieces of furniture for their Fort Greene apartment. He is a research engineer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She is a physics professor at Drew University. They like to hunt for antiques and were cheerfully amused at the chaos. They bent to inspect a Betty Crocker toaster wheel (“What is this?”) and a hand-fashioned lamppost (“Better question: What is this?”) before moving on to another aisle.
Mr. Ober gets his wares from estate sales and the occasional abandoned warehouse but says he does not buy items from his customers. “You have to be careful,” he explained. He has run Green Village since it opened 16 years ago in Greenpoint. Climbing rents forced an earlier move to Williamsburg, then another to Bushwick almost nine years ago.
“Everybody comes here because this is the greatest place,” he said. “And you don’t have to look around long for a good price,” he continued, before correcting himself. “A great price, the best price.”
Chaya Wagschall, 77, a woman who also lives in Williamsburg, has known Mr. Ober for years and often comes to buy toys for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “I have a few hundred, you know,” she joked. Ms. Wagschall shared a few tricks for navigating Green Village: “I look for name-brand toys like Fisher-Price and Little Tikes. You know their quality. They last longer.”
On a recent Sunday — the busiest day for Green Village, which is closed on Saturdays for the Sabbath — the actor Alex Karpovsky, better known as Ray on the HBO show “Girls,” was mulling over some mugs, many of which displayed their provenance in faded lettering on the side: “Railroad Museum, Long Island”; “Café du Monde, New Orleans”; “Mabel’s Whorehouse, Las Vegas.”
“Obviously I am getting this one,” he said of a quirky mug with a doughnut hole through the center, before thinking better of it and placing it back on the shelf. As for the other items piled in his arms, he was prepared to haggle with Mr. Ober for them. “He’d be offended if I didn’t,” Mr. Karpovsky said.
“It’s not true,” Mr. Ober said later. “I hardly ever haggle. Everything is priced fairly, and if the customer buys it, it’s the right price.”
And if they don’t, chances are, somebody else eventually will.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 7, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated when Green Village opened. It was 16 years ago, not 25.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/nyregion/at-green-village-in-bushwick-goods-both-mundane-and-strange.html?partner=rss&emc=rss