Rips The Golden Flea

A Memoir of Obsession and Collecting
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-911547-77-8
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

'An extraordinary portrait of a New York filled with unlikely treasures, human and material.' -- Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland The captivating story of Manhattan's legendary Chelsea Flea Market For decades the legendary Chelsea flea market sprawled over several blocks on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more, seeking treasure. In The Golden Flea, Michael Rips tells the story of his obsession with the Chelsea Flea Market, a curious, charming world inhabited by an eccentric cast of characters. Writing with a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips introduces us to the flea's vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom amongst the treasures and trash. As Rips's passion for collecting grows and the flea's last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one. 'Michael Rips writes with a unique combination of sly humour, close observation, and sympathy.' -- David Salle, author of How to See

Michael Rips is the author of Pasquale's Nose, and The Face of a Naked Lady. He is the executive director of the Art Students League of New York and lives in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rips, Michael

Leseproben

1

A black man in a white hat stood sleeping against a brick wall. Next to him a long ramp. On the other side of the ramp, a white man in a black hat. Snow gathered at their feet.

At the bottom of the ramp was a parking garage.

There were people in that subterranean space.

They talked, smoked, and set up tables. Steam from their coffee rose into the air from the street. It was four-thirty in the morning.

The black man, now awake, pulled the brim of his hat down to cover the hole where his eye had been.

Unlocking the chain that extended across the entry to the ramp, he led me into his cave.

From there, I have yet to return.

—

Inside the cave, the man walked me to his table. Retrieving a lawn chair, he lay down and slept.

Among the objects on his table were slices of carpet, abandoned suits from the laundry down the street, appendages of dolls from the 1950s, a pair of tan shoes with broguing, a woman’s golf bag, a stack of drawings from a high school art class.

None of these had prices, and all were assembled into a single mound.

When the man awoke, I asked whether he would retrieve an item – the shoes.

‘What will happen if I do that?’ he asked.

‘Everything collapses?’

‘Would you like that?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Then why trouble me?’

The man had crooked teeth but plush, purple gums that sparkled when he spoke.

At the next booth sat a small man with sentimental eyes. Against his table were a pair of metal crutches. Five empty frames hung behind him on the wall of the garage.

‘This,’ I said, pointing to one of the frames. ‘Do you know where it is from?’

It was hand-carved and leafed in silver.

‘No.’

‘Or this one?’ I pointed to another.

‘No.’

Any of them?

‘No.’

I took down a frame.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I paused.

He smiled.

A frame or painting or antique table encountered anywhere else, a gallery, museum, or home, comes with an explanatory context: it may be near similar frames, paintings, and furniture with which it shares a style or provenance; it may be accompanied by a text; the owner may have a reputation for collecting things that are important or interesting or, at any rate, are not forgeries.

But here the objects were naked, and effulgently so.

—

The garage had two floors. On each, twenty-five to thirty booths ran along the brick walls, and twenty booths were set up in the centre. In all, there were one hundred vendors, offering paintings, lithographs and photographs, ceramic vases, silver trays, models of ancient ships from museum gift shops, boxes of cuff links, kimonos, used napkins and table-cloths, dinnerware, picture frames, pliers, gold and silver brooches and necklaces, antique rugs, lamps, chandeliers, and furniture from all periods, mug shots, canes, vintage clothes, costume jewellery, Asian scrolls, screens, and jade, sports memorabilia, and African art. And throughout there were stacks of crumbling newspapers and magazines.

On top of one of the stacks, on my first day there, was a newspaper from the 1950s, announcing that outside a small town in Iowa, not far from where I had grown up, a child had been devoured by a combine. There was a picture of the combine, the driver of the combine, slumped to the ground, and an ambulance. A man from the ambulance had his head turned, looking for the child. But, as the driver knew, no child remained.

Oil and gasoline pooled on the floors from the cars parked and serviced in the parking garage during the week. When it rained greatly, shards of paint and filth fell onto the booths and sewage backed up through the drains. Fluorescent lights and asbestos hung loosely from the ceiling, and nails protruded from the walls, hammered there by vendors to display their paintings. With no heat, vendors warmed themselves with coffee and layers of coats. Nonetheless, the concrete walls seemed capable of with-standing any assault, and the pipes that lined the walls did well as supports for vintage clothes, tablecloths, stall signs, and anything else that couldn’t fit on the crowded floors.

Beyond the garage was a constellation of open-air parking lots, which were also rented out to vendors on the weekends. There were three large lots on Sixth Avenue between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Seventh Streets. Down Sixth Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, was another lot; this was the smallest of the lots and was, typically, the last that a buyer would visit. On Twenty-Fifth Street between Sixth and Broadway, next to a large church (once Episcopalian, now Serbian), was another parking lot used as a flea market on the weekends. Edith Wharton (then Edith Jones) was married in the church.

Visitors to certain lots on Sixth Avenue were required to pay a fee to get in, usually a dollar. The lot next to the church required the same. If, however, you wanted to get in before nine o’clock, the fee was $5. Early access meant that the buyer would get a first look at what was being sold by the vendors. Some of the lots opened as early as five or six in the morning. Vendors who arrived at that time traded goods with each other.

Across the street from the parking lot on Twenty-Fifth Street was a building that housed dozens of antiques dealers, each with their separate stalls and metal security grates. Some were open during the week, others were not. Those vendors who were not open would leave a note with their phone number on the outside of the stall. All vendors, though, were open on the weekends, owing to the crowds drawn to the neighbourhood by the flea market. A similar building was just east of the garage on Twenty-Fifth Street.

Both buildings, along with those that surrounded them, had once housed businesses connected to the Garment District, which ran from the mid-Twenties up to Forty-Second Street and from Fifth to Ninth Avenues. At one time, over 90 per cent of the clothing sold in America was manufactured in the Garment District. That had dropped to 3 per cent.

In the 1970s and 80s, as the garment industry evaporated, a cataract of underground clubs, prostitutes, artists, transvestites, writers, and junkies flowed into the neighbourhood. At the same time, with the price of real estate rising in the West Village, gays and lesbians moved into Chelsea, which was nearby and more affordable. Gay bars and sex shops filled Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith took up residence in the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend there in 1978. The flea was a meeting place for the various groups filling Chelsea: rare yet inexpensive items could be found to fill their apartments, artists took inspiration from the accidental combinations of objects, and those who were leaving the clubs and bars in the early morning had a place to go before returning home. People dressed in outlandish costume just to attend the flea market. It was a place to display and create oneself, a diorama of drag and exoticism.

During this period, a man purchased long-term leases on the garage and surrounding parking lots in Chelsea, and on the weekends he rented those out to flea market vendors. From the beginning, when vendors would fall behind on their rents, he would come down to the flea with his brother and announce the amounts that the vendors owed. If the vendors objected to this behaviour, they were thrown out. The brother carried a baseball bat.

Vendors, whether in the garage, open lots, or converted buildings of Chelsea, paid a fee to sell their goods. For those who did not wish to pay a fee, they could set up on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fifth Streets.

This constellation of secondhand markets was known by New Yorkers, and to a host of others who came from beyond the city, as ‘the flea’. Many of those who came to the flea were familiar with similar markets in Paris and London, and many were themselves dealers. Together it may have been one of the largest flea markets in America. It was certainly among the best known, and widely regarded for the treasures to be found there.

—

Born in Nebraska, I viewed most objects as contaminated.

My father and mother, who had grown up with antiques and had inherited antiques from their families, wanted little to do with them. Those objects, their histories, were linked in my parents’ minds to the events that had carried their brothers to war in Europe, where they were killed, or injured for life. The antique was a cesspool, and flea markets its tributary. In New York, I lived with little but my books and journals. They were piled in a corner near a single chair and desk. Nothing hung on the walls, no rugs covered the floors.

My wife, Sheila Berger, grew up in St Louis. Her family enjoyed spending their weekends at estate and garage...