photo: Mike Sheehan
His neighbor's trash! That's where a trailer-park resident discovered a rare Arts & Crafts chair made by Charles Rolhfs. Did he understand what he'd found? Well enough, apparently, to have it appraised. The appraisal was $30,000 but last week at Cottone Auctions in Geneseo, NY, the hotly contested chair sold for $198,000. Someone's singing "Movin' On Up" in the trailer park tonight.
But since this is a blog about finding antiques in New York City, why do we care? Because we're surrounded by the same opportunities.
For starters, check out "Mongo, Adventures in Trash," written by a guy who furnished his entire apartment from stuff he found on the street. According to The New York Times review,
"'Mongo' is slang for garbage salvaged from streets and trash heaps. .
. . By definition, somebody must have thought it worthless, but there's
plenty of mongo that wouldn't be spurned on 'Antiques Roadshow.'" The author, Ted Botha, befriends other mongo scavengers, including a used- and rare-book merchant who collects his inventory from the streets.
Says the author, "The combination of wealth, residents living at close quarters, and the fact that so much gets thrown away out of lack of space, sheer laziness, ignorance or wastefulness means there's lots of mongo and it's easy to reach."
Garbagescout.com is a New York site where people post can photos, descriptions, and the addresses of items they've noticed on the streets and don't want themselves. As I write this, there's a confessional on the street over in Brooklyn, although it looks pretty tacky. (There's also a beer can at 2 Hanover Square, but the photo was posted 40 days ago so it's probably gone by now.)
In 2003 The Times profiled Justin Theroux, a Greenwich Village resident who also decorated his apartment from what he found in Dumpsters. The articles noted that "the salvage fraternity is a living nocturnal subculture, with different tribes and factions and its own ecology."
One such group is the Freegans, who offer events like "Dumpster Diving 101" and "The Trash Tour." Since the the Freegans are into high-minded "strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism," I wonder if these events ever get competitive. If there was a Charles Rolhfs chair left out on the curb in New York City, would the Trash Tour devolve into a fist fight between nouveau capitalists eager to cash in?
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