Landmark lost

I SCORED SOME of my best bargains at the Salvation Army Thrift Store at 22nd and Market.

A vintage Chanel blouse, for $4.90. A monsoon-ready trench coat, for $14. A cute metal floor lamp, for $8, that graced my first single-girl apartment and now lights my married-lady living room. And at least half of my kid's wardrobe when she was in her crazy growth-spurt years.

Two weeks ago, looking to kill time while waiting for the Route 7 bus, which stops just outside the store, I bolted indoors for a quick look at the housewares, always displayed near the front door. Five minutes later, I bounded onto the bus, the happy owner of a ceramic ladle for 95 cents.

Who knew it would be my last score from the cramped, old store, about the length and width of two bowling lanes, that I've frequented for decades? The last time I'd check the chart next to the pocketbook stand to see which colored price tags - pink, blue, green or white - would be half off that day?

And who knew that my last donation - a battered end table, delivered to the shop's back entrance - would mark the last time the courtly older man who worked there would hurry to help me, saying, "That's too heavy for you, ma'am. Let me get it"?

Yesterday afternoon, I watched in fear as rescue workers dug frantically to clear bricks, beams and old clothes from the leveled shop after the collapse of a four-story building next door. More than a dozen people had already been taken to the hospital, another had died and no one knew if more victims were trapped in the basement.

Oh, Lord, that basement.

Accessed by creaky stairs next to the checkout counter, it housed menswear, toys, books, furniture and a small area where blue-aproned workers would eat lunch. Yesterday, looking at the rubble that obscured the stairwell, I covered my eyes as rescue workers gingerly walked on top of it, terrified they'd fall through debris into blackness below.

And I worried who might already be buried there.

"They were such nice people," said Jennifer West, a home-health aide with clients at the Sidney Hillman Apartments, whose front entrance faces the receiving area where I used to drop off my donations.

West and one of her clients allowed me to watch the rescue from the client's ninth-floor window. From above, the rescue workers, clad in black jackets and yellow helmets, looked like bees as they swarmed over the pile. Amid the ruins, a rack of women's clothing stood against the far wall, eerily undisturbed.

"I bought my son the cutest outfits there," said West, face pressed to the glass, staring down as workers created a bucket brigade to move debris. "I got some beautiful things."

West's client, who asked me not to use her name, was livid. For several nights in a row, she said, she'd witnessed a man doing demolition on the roof of the building next to the thrift store.

"This was at 10:30. He had no lights, no hard hat. He was banging a sledgehammer, tearing things up all by himself," said the client, 74, pointing to the air above the collapse where walls once held a roof. "The next day I looked down and saw men carrying stuff across the street with their bare hands. Big beams. They weren't wearing protective gloves or anything. Something wasn't right."

And now the worst had happened. People were hurt. Six were killed.

Gone was a beloved landmark, a place where Rittenhouse swells checked jacket labels alongside college coeds, where out-of-work men quietly shopped for used boots alongside thrifty moms pushing strollers and elderly women checking for cracks in ceramic teacups.

A place where once-prized possessions were dropped off at the back door and sold through the front, given a second chance at usefulness - a metaphor, in retail, for the organization that ran it.

I can't believe the shop is gone.