But just before Broadway dead-ends into Lake Erie, there is a store whose windows are always bright. The 530 Shop, a vintage store with an eclectic assortment of items, from cribbage boards to antique lamps, has been open seven days a week for five years, according to its owner, Art Oehlke.
It is one of the few remaining businesses in this mostly abandoned strip that used to bustle with shoppers when the steel mill and factories flourished. In a grimly familiar Rust Belt refrain, malls came and manufacturing went, and storefronts went dark.
The decline inspired Mr. Oehlke, who is 78, to open the 530 Shop in a building constructed by his grandfather. He wanted to bring some life back into downtown, an effort he now believes was futile. But he continues to run the shop anyway, hoping every day for customers and greeting them warmly when they come, which is not very often.
“It’s slower than hell,” said Mr. Oehlke (pronounced EL-key) on a recent Friday. “Some days it’s so deserted, I feel like I’m the only one here.”
The shop is packed with objects he picked up at estate sales: old maps, lamps, vintage hats, board games, cake platters, license plates, crucifixes and ceramic eagles. American propaganda posters from World War II and photographs of Lorain in its heyday hang on the walls.
Mr. Oehlke never finished high school, dropping out to take a job. He has worked as, among other things, a welder, a truck driver and a sand dredger. Still, he has a special talent for spotting unique objects, which he applied full time after retiring. He selects only things he finds strange or interesting. Never anything new, and never anything that can be found at Walmart, a store he calls “rotten” for how he believes it treats its employees and its suppliers.
But his selection does not draw many customers. The most recent sale he made was two days before, of three nutcracker dolls for $1 each. Sales would be better, he believes, in a college town.
More often people want to sell him things. They bring in belongings of older relatives: rings, collections of comic books and records. They need the money, he said. But these days, he does too, so he rarely obliges them.
“In Lorain, everyone is selling everything,” Mr. Oehlke said. “People are selling stuff they don’t ordinarily want to sell, stuff that’s been in the family.”
Recently a young woman who had driven from several hours away tried to sell him some of her belongings, including books and magazines, he said. He had bought things from her before, mostly out of pity, but on that day he could not afford to. She stayed in the store for some time, he said, crying softly in a back aisle.
On the recent Friday, a man in a blue wool hat came in with a plastic bag full of old records.
“Do you buy albums?” he asked, placing scruffy copies of Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, the Ohio Players and Donna Summer on the counter.
Mr. Oehlke said he did not, but chatted with him anyway. The man’s name was Jason Freeman. He said the last time he had worked was six years ago, cleaning steel dust at the steel mill. Now, at 52, he collects cans and looks for homes left empty in evictions, salvaging the belongings that people leave behind.
It took him two full days, he said, to transfer all the albums in this particular collection to his apartment, carrying them in double plastic bags on his bicycle.
Though estate sales are the source of most of Mr. Oehlke’s merchandise, he is still struck by how weird it is to be sifting through the remains of a stranger’s life.
“It’s a funny feeling when you go in a house and there is stuff on a night stand as if they had just left,” he said. “I never did get used to that feeling.”
Once he had a start at a sale when he came upon an old man who had lived in the house sitting quietly in a chair in a back bedroom, an encounter that made him sorry for the man and angry at the organizers.
“They could have put him somewhere else,” he said.
He often feels sorry for elderly parents whose children are intent on selling their belongings. Once a man who looked to be in his 30s arrived with his mother offering some of her belongings for sale.
“I could tell she hated giving up her stuff,” he said. “It’s your life, and they are selling it.”
Mr. Oehlke did not say how much the shop makes. But a clue, he said, is in the thermostat on the wall near the cash register, which showed 45 degrees. If the store were more profitable, he said, it would be warmer.
But he preferred to see the bright side.
“It’s got an advantage,” he said. “If I have to go somewhere, I already have my coat on.”
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