Philadelphia's Antiques Row in transition

Ted Kirk draws deeply on his cigarette, rests his elbows on his splayed knees, and takes a long, sad look around. He is sitting in the once cluttered, now scavenged, showroom of his brother Jack's antiques shop in Center City. Hardly anything is left, other than a few cardboard moving boxes, a couple of dusty rugs rolled up like stogies, and some orphaned leaded glass windows.

"My brother was a fixture," Kirk says. "He had his store for 40 years."

Ted is not sure how long Jack's shop - Antique Design - was on the 1100 block of Pine Street. Long enough, though, for his brother to have watched the lights snuffed out like gaslights, one by one, along Antiques Row.

On Aug. 16, when Jack, 62, died of cancer, Ted, a septic tank contractor in Florida, was left with the daunting job of clearing out the remains of a formerly thriving enterprise.

"Business had been slow, like for anybody in the antique business," he said.

The store is about to close, leaving yet another hole in this once lucrative and legendary retail district.

A few doors down, Kohn & Kohn Antiques, established 1932, is holding a liquidation sale. On the corner where, back in 1956, Albert Maranca started selling fine 18th and 19th century European furniture and decor, a sign advertises 70 percent off whatever stock is left until the doors close for good, sometime in October.

"I'd say things started to go downhill in 2008," said Dee Wolf, who used to run two antiques stores on Pine Street. After 21 years in business, she gave up and is now helping clear out Maranca's store.

After Albert died several years ago, his nephew John Christaldi took over. Now Christaldi has decided to cut his losses.

So the pair of eight-foot high bronze angels carrying a $16,000 price tag are now available for $6,400. The estate-sized Italian Rococo mirror is a steal at $4,800. And in the corner, a magnificent rectangular marble table top is waiting to be taken home for a mere $275.

Nationally, the antiques trade has bumped along with periodic reports of declines and recoveries since 2003.

Last winter, John Smiroldo, founder and publisher of the bimonthly magazine Antiques and Fine Art, told the New York Times that "collectors are going after A-level material . . . but you can get A-minuses for pennies of what it will be trading for in four or five years. As far as I'm concerned, American furniture is free right now - for killer stuff. And high-style English furniture is down, down, down."

In addition to the economic downturn, antiques dealers say younger generations seem to have lost the taste for the truly old.

"The problem is, there is no young blood coming into this business," said Jeffrey Biber, who has run his shop on the 1000 block of Pine Street for 28 years.

From his perch in a worn, brass-studded leather office chair, Biber had just finished discussing a valuable bowl with a representative of Sotheby's.

"You don't have to bust your brains to send me an estimate," Biber said to the auction house's agent, "I want to sell it through Sotheby's. I apologize I can't buy more there, but because of the economy, I'm kind of tied up right now."

Biber works from a small clearing in his prodigious collection of silver napkin rings and ornamental lamps, pendulum clocks and gold cufflinks, vintage medicine bottles and English china, ivory and lace fans, and one 1962 pamphlet, "How to Play Mah Jongg."

He said he inherited his love of antiques from his grandmothers: "I liked the aroma and aesthetic qualities of their homes. I used to dig around in their cellars and closets."

A thin, elegant man with porcelain blue eyes framed by thin gold wire-rimmed glasses, Biber said, "The unfriendly flight of the antique dealers is mortality."

Each year, with the passing of his colleagues like Kirk and Maranca, he said, he feels more like an increasingly rare item from another era.

"In order to open an antique shop like this, you have to be taken under the wing of an experienced antique dealer," he said. A combination of changing tastes, insufficient support for arts education, and the prohibitive cost of investing in inventory makes this line of work unappealing to young entrepreneurs.

As Jack Kirk's health declined, his brother said, his business depended mostly on consignments.

Although other Antiques Row merchants have been helpful, he said, "I have no idea what the value of most of this stuff is. I'm not an antiques guy. I let people take whatever they want."

One of those people was James Loughead, a longtime friend of Jack's. Loughead, with help from a husky helper, was moving a brass display case out of Kirk's shop.

The two men shuffled the heavy piece down the steps, onto Pine, then a few yards toward the corner, into Albert Maranca's shop.

In October, Loughead said, he will open a new store in Maranca's old space. Called Hammarhead Parts & Service, the shop will sell industrial furnishings and lighting and durable clothes for men and women.

"Antiques Row is undergoing this rebirth," said Loughead. He pointed to new art galleries, one started by a young University of the Arts graduate, Matt Trikgo; the edgy James Brown Hair salon; and the hip restaurant Mixto.

"One way to look at this is that antique stores are closing and the place is dying. Another is to see it as a place in transition. This is going to be new, more vibrant, not less in the long run," Loughead said. "The demographic has changed."