Vintage shopping

Let's go to the Antique Mall on Main Street in Crown Point, Indiana. It's right across the street from the old courthouse, where young things used to elope to, say in 1937 (my aunt was eighteen, her new husband seventeen -- there was hell to pay), and it's right across the other street from the old jail that couldn't hold Dillinger. Johnny Depp filmed part of Public Enemies here. The locals were suitably agog.

First floor: the best is usually here. The second floor offers things of only middling quality and interest, and the third floor is given over entirely to holiday shlock, year round. Even before it was turned over to that, it was the place to find Pez dispensers and little troll dolls. But the first floor -- well, you might find here a big scarf which is almost certainly silk, and even looks like Hermes. The colors a bit drab, but otherwise a fairly good fake, perhaps?





The things people save. Old, empty bottles of celery tonic. Perhaps it was the Red Bull -- or the green tea -- of 1906.



If you are an antique dealer and you'd like to rent this space,



-- this, the courthouse, will be the view out your window.



Random finds: only the French would make a lamp like this. But if the dealer claimed, on the little handwritten price tag, that this was Polish or Argentinian, would it seem as beautiful?



Good heavens: my parents' old bedroom set.



Why yes, it's a radio. They were more decorative in 1934.



And a unique piece of Americana: a black family places a portrait of Woodrow Wilson on the mantel piece, below the bunting around the picture of the absent soldier father, and near both Abraham Lincoln and, a bit hidden behind the price tag, George Washington.