he late 1960’s and early 1970’s saw the heyday of antiques on Atlantic Avenue, boasting over 300 stores from Flatbush Avenue to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Today the hub is slowly downsizing. The twenty-four antique and collectible stores now listed in Atlantic Avenue’s Shopping guide are located within a four-block radius between Bond and Hoyt Streets. The shops range from the compact and crowded showroom of the Incurable Collector to Dorseman Antiques’ three floors of oversized couches and wicker armoires.

The Incurable Collector sells items from local venders, dealers, auctions and estates, with only a limited number of pieces from overseas. The main showroom, overstocked with intricately painted writing tables and chairs to match, also features large standing mirrors with thick frames are painted in deep shades of black and green, or copper and metal. Interspersed throughout the store are rocking chairs that appear too delicate to sit on and mahogany grandfather clocks that seem incapable of keeping time, which are sometimes used to prop a painting up or hide a flaw on a piece that may need more work. The cheapest items in the Incurable Collector are the short and compact Bronze Candlesticks for $45; the average small desk or table at the Incurable Collector, usually void of artistic embellishment or extensive restoration, costs between $700 and $900. The most expensive item in the store is kept safely in the downstairs storage and workspace and arrived at the store just weeks ago. An “Anglo-Colonial Tilt-Top” wooden breakfast table that costs $18,000, plus shipping will likely not be put on display but sold to a regular customer. The store has three small showcase rooms and a workspace downstairs where furniture is restored and extra pieces are held until floor space is available.

John Vicari, co-owner of the Incurable Collector misses the days of Atlantic Avenue’s monopoly on antiques. “The more antique stores the better,” said Vicari. “If we are going to attract people from far away, the bigger the market they have to shop in, the better for us honest salesmen,” he says. Many antique buyers have relocated and retired to upstate New York vacation areas like the Catskills, Vicari says, and so, many dealers have left Atlantic Avenue, saturating those vacation areas with antique shops, and attracting the potential business that may have previously come to Brooklyn.

Atlantic Avenue is still a retro-collector’s haven with shops like Dorseman Antiques. A pale blue retro record player sits on one table to provide a “diner-style” touch to a room, and 40’s-style air conditioners share a desk with 4-foot-tall plastic dog statuettes. In the back room of the first floor showroom, a red-vinyl table and chair set attracts attention away from the drab wood of the rest of the furniture. While Dorseman’s three showrooms can house the huge pieces, the most commonly sold items are mirrors, lamps and painting—things that can be carried out under an arm or placed easily into a car. The lower prices, co-owner Frank Caruso says, are an incentive because the uncertain customer feels like he has made less of a commitment.