The city is blossoming, but the junk man endures
The junk man tuned his radio to the classical station and considered his bare windows. As Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus climbed to its crescendo, the junk man posed to himself questions befitting an artist: "What I am trying to do? What am I going to say?"
The junk man tuned his radio to the classical station and considered his bare windows. As Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus climbed to its crescendo, the junk man posed to himself questions befitting an artist: "What I am trying to do? What am I going to say?"
In each empty shelf the junk man saw a blank canvas. A chance to pick through his piles of baubles and bric-a-brac - and make a statement. It is the junk man's fun. But in the rush and roar of a metropolis, the junk man's windows also serve as small markers of time's endless march. Because as the seasons change, so must the junk.
For April Fools' Day, the porcelain clowns. For Mother's Day, African fertility goddesses. For Phillies Opening Day, Russian nesting dolls with the faces of ballplayers. The vintage presidential campaign buttons (Perot for President) will stay put until November.
"My montage," said the proud junk man, Michael Mancuso, as he designed his spring window display at Circa Gallery, his Sansom Street shop where he has sold his collections for nearly four decades.
People love his windows, he said. The ones who notice, anyway. It's what brings them inside to browse the overflowing aisles of what he calls his "miniature museum of the 20th century."
His crowded shelves of antique toys and animal figurines. His religious statuettes and comic books. His old-time movie posters and postcard collections. His secondhand dishes and snow globes. His marbles and flashbulb cameras.
It's what keeps people buying.
While the higher-end antique shops of Pine Street and the newer, kitschier vintage spots in Fishtown and Northern Liberties would likely eschew the label of a junk store, Mancuso's shop has always best been described as just that.
"Trash with flash," Mancuso, 71, said with a smile.
He opened in the 1970s, when the main draws of the 2000 block of Sansom were a laundromat and a brothel.
"The service industries," Mancuso said. He sold vintage lingerie to the prostitutes ("The girls were very nice. They bought lots of junk.") and shooed away drunken sailors banging on the wrong door.
He watched from his window as nightclubs and discos opened across the street - and saw the Jackson 5 pull up in a limousine. He watched the same nightclubs and discos close and burn down, only to be replaced by comedy clubs and restaurants and theaters.
From the junk man's window, the city has made and remade itself over and over again.
The junk man has endured.
"Junk sells," he said.
He finds beauty in the things he brings into his shop. In the heavy art books on Renaissance painters and Edwardian sculptors. In the Marilyn Monroe figurines and Elvis dolls and Japanese pinball machines. In the striking simplicity of the African tribal masks. (Having studied mask-making, the junk man looks at them with a designer's eye.)
He takes satisfaction in the excitement of his customers who find some once-beloved item among the mishmash.
"The weirder the better," he said.
Long ago, the shop became the junk man's life, and he has enjoyed the life it's given him. He lives upstairs with his husband, Jack, who works another job but helps out in the shop. In the afternoons, their old mutt, Kali, lumbers downstairs to sit in the sunspot by the counter.
From his step, the junk man can see the towering condos rising all around. He feels his long undersold city is finally "blossoming."
Amid the change, the junk man goes on doing what he has always done - changing out his junk with the seasons, until the old becomes novel again.
As he put the finishing touch on his windows, a girl walked in. From the street, she had caught a glimpse of a sequined evening gown that would not have been out of place at those long-gone nightclubs.
"I've been down this street so many times," she said.
As a city changes around him, the junk man will endure for those who notice.
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