The Carnival of Collectables antiques mall, a fun house of nostalgia, is closing

As I was leaving the Carnival of Collectables in Sicklerville on Wednesday, after four hours of exploring the 12,000-square-foot antiques and art mall (for research), I spotted a large velvet painting of a sweaty Bruce Springsteen I’d somehow missed.

Like most velvet paintings — which are notoriously tacky works of art on black, velvet canvases that were popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s — this Springsteen portrait was moody, gaudy, and glorious.

“I can’t believe this hasn’t sold yet!” I said to co-owner Edward Jankowski.

“You think that’s good?” he said, before offering to show me the pièce de résistance of what he said is the largest collection of velvet paintings anywhere.

There, in a back room, behind a black curtain it hung — a portrait on velvet of Burt Reynolds in the buff on a bearskin rug, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and an artfully placed fig leaf over his groin.

It was just one of the many wonders I saw at the Carnival of Collectables, but unlike the rest of the items, this velvet portrait was not for sale.

Some things are just too precious to part with, or to put a price tag on.

Others, however, are not. Trinkets and treasures up for grabs at the more than 130 vendors at this South Jersey emporium included jars of 1950s hair pomade ($1), the entire M*A*S*H series on VHS ($50), a 1987 Phillies calendar ($11), a student dental kit with false teeth ($150), a DVD of Ed Wood’s 8mm porn loops ($20), a Chewbacca family painting of the famous Wookie, his pearl-clad wife, their three kids, and a hairless cat ($12), and an orange Jell-O mold lamp with plastic Venus fly traps coming out of it ($90).

Almost everything was discounted too, because after a decade in business, the Carnival of Collectables is reluctantly closing its doors with a celebration for its customers and vendors on Sunday.

The Carnival is co-owned by Jankowski, who’s an engineer, his wife, Loreli, and their longtime friend, Ulana Zahajkewycz, an illustration teacher at Moore College of Art & Design.

The three love antiquing and collecting and after Zahajkewycz visited her first antiques mall — a market where vendors rent booths or provide a percentage of sales to a shopkeeper so they don’t have to remain on site — she approached her friends about opening one of their own.

They opened their mall on Cross Keys Road in 2014 with just one vendor.

“We really took a leap of faith. It was terrifying, if I’m honest,” Zahajkewycz said.

But it quickly paid off. Within the first three months, the trio filled all of their more than 130 stalls. Today, the booths — with names like “The Album Hunter,” “Garden State Vintage,” and “Freaks n’ Ghouls,” — are lovingly curated by the vendors, 14 of whom have gone on to open their own brick-and-mortar stores.

The wait list for a space at the Carnival is now 16 pages long and yet, the owners are being forced to close their doors after they say a rent hike made staying open financially untenable. They hope to reopen someday, somewhere in South Jersey, but they don’t have a space lined up.

One of the toughest parts, Zahajkewycz said, was telling their five employees and calling all of their vendors last month to break the news. For some of them, their booth at the Carnival is their main source of income.

“It’s unbelievable. It was absolutely heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s a real heartbreak for the community, too, because I’ve had a million customers come up to me and say how upset they are.”

Since the store announced its closing earlier this month, customers have stopped in to offer their condolences and go on one final hunt for hidden treasures.

This is a business that still did deliveries and layaways, a shop where the owners put call buttons (in the shape of rubber duckies) throughout the store so customers didn’t need to walk to the counter for help, and where all manner of pets (from pigs to tarantulas) were always welcome.

At a time when almost everything you can think of is for sale somewhere online, the Carnival was a place to find things you weren’t necessarily thinking of, but you never really forgot either.

“There’s just something about finding something what we call ‘in the wild,’ where you’re not online specifically looking for an item, that just makes the hunt that much better,” Jankowski said. “You can go on eBay and find pretty much anything, but in here having it in your hands and touching it just brings back nostalgia.”

One of their favorite parts about running the Carnival, the owners said, was seeing the faces of people who found something that reminded them of their past or uniting a customer with something that they’ve been searching for forever.

“It makes me feel satisfied that they got to have this beautiful moment again and that they’re going to take this item home and treasure it forever,” Zahajkewycz said.

A particularly touching moment, she said, was when a customer found a photograph that used to hang in a local bar where his grandfather worked. I asked Zahajkewycz if he bought the picture.

“He sure did,” she said. “I would have bought it for him if he didn’t buy it.”

There’s been plenty of items that have come through the Carnival the owners have snatched up for themselves too, like Stumpy, who’s become a mall mascot. It’s a stuffed, footless bear with an unnerving plastic face that was a vintage carnival prize.

Stumpy appears in the shop’s social media posts and a large cutout of him stands next to the mall’s roadway sign along with another mascot — carnival barker Mr. Midway — both of which Zahajkewycz painted.

The large pink elephant in front of the store — Stampy — was bought by the Jankowskis from a former New Jersey Republican mayor who used it in parades. The owners painted him pink to draw more attention to the mall.

Before I left, I had to get the scoop on the velvet paintings, the sheer number and variety of which was mind-blowing. There were portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, Elvis, Malcolm X, Michael Jackson, and clowns, along with paintings of dogs, woodland scenes, unicorns, eagles, horses, tigers, wolves, lions, and ships.

Jankowksi said he bought them from a man who used to sell the paintings on the side of Route 70 during the summer, as people drove to and from the Jersey Shore. The dealer’s collection totaled 9,000 and Jankowksi went in with another antiques mall owner, who took 2,000 of them.

Of the 7,000 velvet paintings he originally acquired, Jankowksi said there’s about 4,000 remaining.

I didn’t buy a velvet painting, a decision I may long regret, but I did have my own moment in the mall, where I saw something that instantaneously brought me joy.

For years, I’ve searched for a Christmas blow mold — those hollow, plastic, light-up lawn decorations that were popular from the 1950s to 1970s. I don’t know why I’ve wanted one; I never had one as a child, but my desire has only grown deeper over the years.

I was in the last aisle of the mall when I looked up and saw a three-foot vintage Santa Claus blow mold. My heart grew three sizes and all professional decorum went out the window — I was just a kid who’d finally found what I have wanted for years.

Its paint was chipped in a few places, but its old-timey plug still worked and with a 20% going-out-of-business discount, he came out to $56. I took a selfie with him and texted it to my husband.

“I’m bringing home a new friend,” I wrote.

We’ve named him Santy, and whenever I look at him, I’ll think about how I found him “in the wild” at the Carnival of Collectables.

A closing celebration will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Carnival of Collectables,368 Cross Keys Road, Suite B, Sicklerville, N.J., 08081.