One Attic's Treasure
The buxom blonde with the high heels and azure eyes stands with her arms folded above her head and her back arched to push two of her selling points out even farther. A short trip from Four Corners, the sailor's dream - all this busting out from under an American flag bathing suit - comes with an asking price of $450.
Jackie Nolan, owner of The Crowded Attic, says she knows the nameless statue, seemingly plucked from the front of a ship or Bourbon Street circa World War II, flaunting her goods in front of her North University Avenue store will sell, just as an identical one did.
"A lot of people are asking; their reaction is 'whoo!' But where else you gonna get one?" she asks from a comfy chair in her store. The shop is a wall-to-wall smorgasbord of odds and ends priced anywhere from $1 to $3,000. But out of the hundreds of knick-knacks and furniture sets, the statue is the definite attention-getter.
Unlike most of the inventory at The Crowded Attic, the looker came from a man Nolan calls a picker, who travels the country bringing goodies acquired in California, where things like the statue enter into the country on ships. She buys most of her inventory, however, by the house full from private parties. It's a mix of bedroom sets, books and figurines that she calls "a used furniture store." Nolan will also allow second-hand store, but clarifies that they are not antiques.
Nolan took over the shop some 22 years ago when it was still located near the airport. Her foray into second-hand furnishings came by chance. "I wanted to change my life, I guess, and I was going down the road one day, and The Crowded Attic was going out of business. So, I had bought some furniture there, and I stopped and they said they were closing. I said, 'Well, can I rent the building and the house?'"
After 14 years by the airport, she needed another change and more space, so she relocated to the current spot.
Like most business owners, she says she sometimes takes her work home with her. "In the beginning, we used to change out my furniture a lot. We take what we needed." At least once, the business went both ways as she fell on hard times and sold her own washer.
The inventory varies from time to time, because so much depends on what people will sell her. Any regular can tell you, though, there is one constant. Because she tries to buy odd, there's been a lot of strange stuff passed over her counter.
"You can't buy everything odd. I zero in on odd things. ... People don't like humdrum stuff. Some people can't live with odd stuff; they want the humdrum." It was a daunting task she says could have taken weeks, but she and her employee Hugo Boutte managed to pick the two oddest things they have ever brought in: an electric duck plucker and two large red bellows used to start a fire. As a last resort, the bellows had to be sold at an auction, but Nolan says she remains confident that even her most bizarre shelf item - or the life size Indian couple decked out in Western garb - will sell.
"It takes a certain person to buy things, and you can have things a day and you can have things for over a year. You absolutely never know. I've put stuff on sale, and no one buys it. So after a while, you put the price up they come in and they buy it. 'Cause it takes the certain person to want anything you have."
Eventually, she says, "everything sells."