Gone flea marketing

Rico says it could have been written about his ladyfriend, but Guy Trebay wrote it for The New York Times about other people:

Hanging from the doorknob of a modest brick house in Flushing, Queens, is a laminated government flier advising the homeowner, “It’s not too late to mail back your census form!”
But, in fact, it is too late for Gertrude Wetterhahn to register for the census. In late February, Mrs. Wetterhahn permanently quit both 144-26 73rd Street and this life at age 94.
And now, at 8:45 on a cool spring morning, strangers have lined up outside her two-story home, one in a series of attached houses in this leafy and largely Hasidic neighborhood. Each person is clutching a number. Each is impatient for 9am, when the door will swing open and the material remains of Mrs. Wetterhahn’s existence will be scoured and gone over by estate-sale scroungers, advancing as relentlessly as a column of ants.
It is a small group, just 25 people, and a modest sale, one of scores listed weekly on websites like estatesales.net. But, for Peter and Jaroslava Cole, it will turn out to be a choice one, the best of a day that will take them from their apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on a circuit that leads, after Flushing, north to Rockland County, and then to Yonkers and Harlem, as they hunt for fresh stock to sell at the Brooklyn Flea.
Mr. Cole is a sculptor. His wife spends much of her time raising their eight-year-old daughter. Anyone who has visited the Brooklyn Flea, the wildly popular weekend market held in a lot behind Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, will recognize the couple, seasoned vendors with tastes so catholic that at times they seem utterly random.
Asking what in particular they seek is like asking a magpie to provide its organizing principle. And that is what makes their booth so magnetic to people with the “finder aesthetic” New York magazine assures us is so pervasive just now. “We don’t deal in good, we deal in low and middlebrow,” said Mr. Cole, 45, who supports his sculpture habit with a day job as a welder, serving wealthy clients who think nothing of asking why a particular screw head has to be so round.
On any given weekend, a flea-market hound stopping at the Coles’ stand is likely to happen upon a painted kitchen stool from the 1950s, or else a canvas dog tote from Hermès, or a beaded grass fetish figure from New Guinea, or a silk peignoir washed and refreshed by Mrs. Cole, or a jaunty cloth bag filled with hand-hewn clothespins found in Mrs. Wetterhahn’s laundry room.
These treasures are typically uncovered when their owners die or divorce or fall into debt or tire of them. Then, as Alastair Clark, a Sotheby’s auctioneer, recently noted, the material goods carefully accumulated over a lifetime “go back into the slipstream”, much as the furniture from the London apartment of the philanthropist Jayne Wrightsman did last month.
Superficially, the ballyhooed Wrightsman auction had little in common with the dispersal of Mrs. Wetterhahn’s modest estate. Yet a person who happened to stop by Sotheby’s pre-auction viewing would have seen storage bags hand-labeled by their owner— A Table for Ten People, Miscellaneous Items Not in Daily Use— and concluded that those goods looked little different from the stuff at the Wetterhahn sale. It is true that the strangers who came to bid on Mrs. Wrightsman’s things were not welcomed, as pickers at Mrs. Wetterhahn’s house were, to rummage through drawers containing a poignant assortment of underclothes and a selection of souvenir silk travel scarves. But they were enacting a similar ritual, in which once-cherished objects, having lost their original purpose, die briefly and are then reborn.
“The first ten people at these sales always get the really good pieces,” Mr. Cole said on a recent Friday. He was referring to the mid-century modern stuff, whose popularity never seems to wane. And, sure enough, the first picker into the house scored a walnut coffee table with a nougat marble top for $200.
“It’s better for us this way, because we don’t really know what anything is,” Mr. Cole added. It is also better in another sense because, in the rush to grab the best stuff on this Friday, the competition swept past a hall closet in which Mrs. Cole later happened upon a leather-banded mink, of 1970s vintage, with labels from Bergdorf Goodman and Revillon. The sale supervisor, Michal Landor, priced the coat for a mere $25. Thus, before breakfast, the Coles’ day was made. “Our niche is the stuff that’s left after all the freaks have had their pick.”
They mark their finds up from four to ten times. And, while it is not obvious how this can amount to a living, given that much of what the two buy costs under $10, they said they have lost money only once on a Brooklyn Flea weekend, netting $13 less than the $100 to rent a patch of flea market asphalt in Fort Greene. “It looks pretty good when you make $200 a day from your day job and you can suddenly earn $1,000 at the Flea,” Mr. Cole said.
The best day the two ever had, “we made $1,500”, said Mrs. Cole, who met her future husband at a flea market stall she once operated in Vienna. That includes the years when they sold together in San Francisco, and later in Santa Barbara, California, where Mr. Cole was raised in part and where they moved a decade ago in the hope that a laid-back life on land his parents owned in the mountains would help them conceive a child. Their daughter Charlotte, called Charlie, is usually on hand at the Brooklyn Flea. On a recent Saturday, she was there offering $6 polka-dot manicures. Charlie seldom accompanies the Coles on their scavenging rounds, and a day spent scrounging through the Freudian nightmare that was one upstate collector’s house made clear why. Prowling through moldy basements or the stale-smelling racks of castoffs at the Salvation Army takes work, and an unexpected degree of passion, and also possibly a hand-hewn clothespin clipped to one’s nose. “The essence of all this is really in the getting of the object,” said Mr. Cole, a “deep accumulator of shallow objects” who over his lifetime has assembled collections of beer cans, matchbooks, ashtrays, European apothecary bottles, and who is currently stockpiling string. “Once I put something up on a shelf, I’m not nearly as interested as I was at that one little moment of discovery, when it’s just you and the object,” he said as he piloted the couple’s 2007 Chrysler Town and Country through Yonkers, where a Day-Glo orange tag-sale sign stapled to an electric pole triggered his U-turn reflex.
As it happened, the tag sale was held at a house whose occupant had also stumbled into the used-goods economy. “I always got fired from every job,” said Michael Stephens, whose business card reads, Michael’s House of Elegant Junk. Standing amid folding tables filled with neatly displayed crockery, straw hats, and a plastic wrapped Lady Godiva wig, Mr. Stephens laid out a trajectory that led him one day from a human resources office where he’d been pink-slipped to a thrift shop in Yonkers, where he found a Gucci bag for $1.99. “I had a light bulb moment, as Oprah says,” said Mr. Stephens, who resold that bag, and another one of alligator, for one hundred times the purchase price. There is gold lying on the ground, Mr. Stephens preached to the Coles, who required no conversion. From among the elegant junk on Mr. Stephens’s lawn, they had already picked up a $5 felt fedora and a sheath from the 1940s to add to their earlier finds. “Stuff I get from the garbage is the first thing that people want to buy,” Mr. Stephens said.
“New York is great for that,” added Mr. Cole, who recently found three paintings leaning against a lamppost in Chelsea and had the last laugh on the colleagues who called him crazy when he went on to sell the found pictures for $75 at the Brooklyn Flea.