In California: The Joy of Spending

By Jane O'Reilly

The day began with strawberry tarts, fresh orange juice and a Dixieland band. Fine priming for the nearly 1,200 people, most of whom had paid $250 (applicable to any later purchase) to attend a three-day auction billed as "the greatest collection of architectural antiques ever offered for sale by anyone--anywhere--at any time." Assembled under six tents and a former Two Guys store in a remote corner of Los Angeles were, roughly counting, 4,000 windows, doors, ceilings, entryways and greenhouses of stained, beveled and etched glass, 200 paneled rooms, bars, pubs and shop interiors, and more than 100 mantels, inglenooksand "other miscellany."

It was the ninth auction put on by John P. Wilson, 40, a former precision-instruments salesman who switched to the nostalgia industry nine years ago, when he turned an unexpectedly tidy profit on a surplus lot of 1,000 old pull-chain toilets --a $100,000 windfall now memorialized in the name of his company: Golden Movement Emporium.

The crowd around the breakfast bar --cleverly constructed in the semi-antique mode from old railroad baggage carts--admiringly described Wilson as "the P.T. Barnum of the auction business." Barnum, it will be remembered, held it true that "there is a sucker born every minute." To encourage five-figure bids, Wilson provided shuttle buses, disposable toothbrushes in rest rooms, free phones, simultaneous translation for a group of 25 Japanese, and $300,000 worth of frankly fabulous food catered by Los Angeles Restaurateur Robert J. Morris. The wine flowed like water, and so did the Perrier. "I think it's a goddam hoot," grinned a Texan, as a forklift truck rolled past bearing 1,200 live Maine lobsters.

It was part circus, part revival meeting, part convention. Most of the paying guests, according to Wilson, were hotel and shopping-center people and "the Who's Who of the theme-restaurant business." Theme restaurants have nothing to do with Ye Olde Tea Shoppes. These days quaint is a growth industry. Houlihan's Old Place, for example, has grown in the past seven years from one place in Kansas City to a national chain of 18 restaurants, featuring stained glass, antique kitsch and rock music. Recently bought by W.R. Grace, Houlihan's will open ten new restaurants this year at a cost of $1 million each. Part of Houlihan's decorating inventory, two warehouses full, came from Wilson's earlier auctions.

Bidding starts high and goes higher --roughly double last year's prices. Explanations vary. "We're totally greed motivated," jokes a restaurant owner from Seattle. "The only reason I'm paying $40,000 for a paneled room is because it wil help raise my take from $1 million to $2 million." Says Bob Snow, owner of the Rosie O'Grady entertainment-cum-preservation complexes in Orlando and Pensacola: "At the first auction I paid $4,500 for a real historic bar from Chicago. This year ordinary bars are bringing $45,000. 1 don't know whether it's the total devaluation of the dollar or total inflation, or a general dissatisfaction with shoddy material. Some of this is good, beautifully made stuff." Adds a woman who has recently made a genuine fortune in Western land development: "Out here it's all spend it, wear it, show it, and this stuff makes a wonderful situation for the business person. It appreciates while it is depreciated."

The situation is wonderful enough, evidently, to make it seem economically sensible to pay $10,000 for several pieces of stained glass put together into a ceiling that might have cost $1,000 a few years ago. ("So it's gotta be worth $20,000 in a coupla years, right?") But if that $10,000 ceiling goes into a building on the National Register of Historic Places as part of a renovation approved by the Department of the Interior, it can be written off under recent preservation and renovation tax benefits. Or, as a capital improvement to a building 20 years old or older, it can be eligible for a 10% investment tax credit. "Preservation" pays.

A distant rumble offstage and the deafening shout of the auctioneers announce the arrival of "a front and back bar, English, a real beauty, who'll start me at $25,000?" The whole thing, garnished with plants and beer mugs, is rolled onto the stage on a dolly, where a crew rotates it under the lights. The motion makes it a little hard actually to see the object being offered, but it "puts more color into the wood," says Acey Decy Equipment Co.'s Peter Ritter. The sound system is pitched to discourage any distracting conversation in the audience. Young women in long, sexy T shirts pass out ice-cream daiquiris. People sit clutching bid cards in one hand and plates of shrimp, ribs, tacos, fruit, salad in the other. In the aisles, dozens of bid spotters, dressed in implausible ice cream-hued tuxedos, gesture, shout, plead, cheer and jump.

The pub goes for a rock-bottom $12,500. No matter. Keep going, keep the average up, aim for $10 million. The first day brings "over $4 million." The three-day total, a satisfied Wilson reports: "upwards of $7 1/2 million." The pub is duly dispatched, to be knocked back into the bits and pieces of wood and glass from which it came and shipped off by container--arriving as one big jigsaw puzzle. The transportation and reassembly may cost as much as the object itself. But, insists Dennis Gibbons of Grand American Fare, "you couldn't build a paneled room for the price of these pieces. You can't get this stuff any more."

Actually you can. The crafts required live on. People in Europe and the U.S. still build paneled rooms and beveled-glass entryways. They have, in fact, built a good many of the lots in this auction. At the back of the hall Marty Duffy of Ely, Iowa, and Roger Wandrey of Portland, Ore., watch in bemused silence as the intricate glass clusters and stained-glass domes that they made are sold. So do not weep for the little old lady whose oak-paneled inglenook -- so cozy with a gin and bitters-- is now going to be part of a restaurant theme. The inglenook was probably put together from remnants and refimshed. "What a piece!" shouts an auctioneer, as a Gothic pulpit is wheeled up. "Put a disco jockey in that and you've really got something." Not only instant restaurant, but instant imagination.

Which is not to say, not at all, that John Wilson is trying to fool anybody. If a paneled room with baronial fireplace happens to be from London's Barclays Bank, he says so, and an Oklahoma City developer is pleased indeed to buy it for $32,500. But at a preview Wilson has also eagerly explained that a particular "pub" was actually taken from a church and rearranged. "We embellish, combine, try to keep the period," he says.

Chris Mortenson, 31, who develops land in Montana and San Diego, buys one of the auction's truly great pieces, a stained-glass dome originally made for a San Francisco Elks' hall. He pays $90,000 but has no special plans for its use.

Hugh and Judith Marshall, a young couple from Houston, acquire the entire interior of the Mappin and Webbs Jewelry Store in England for $70,000. Marshall is in the oil business in Calgary, owns a jewelry store there, and plans to open one in Houston. The Marshalls also buy two general-store interiors they plan to put on their farm outside Houston as a sort of produce stand. Singer Dick Clark buys an entire pub. Two local housewives, seized by pure impulse, acquire a drug store interior for $11,000.

Evan Blum, 25, of Irreplaceable Artifacts in New York City, came to watch. He already owns a part of the fac,ade of the old Chicago Stock Exchange and the cornice of Manhattan's Commodore Hotel. He suggests people start saving, for future investment, early formica tabletops "with the pink-and-gray blob design."

Even as the theme-artifact market was booming, another restaurant trend was developing. That day, of the two most In restaurants in Los Angeles, one was operating without a sign of identification, the other with an unlisted phone number. In both, the decor could only be called early tool shed.

-- Jane O'Reilly

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