Hope Quest

Collectors believe.

That the affordable armoire of their dreams might be at the garage sale around the corner. That the very Rookwood planter they have sought for a decade could be at the next Glendale antique show. That the silver Jensen pin that has eluded them in life to date could show up in an otherwise undistinguished antique shop somewhere in the San Fernando Valley (well, it could happen).

Instead of going to church to express their faith, collectors shop.

With their wish lists firmly in mind, they regard an hour or two of wandering from store to store not as a chore, but as a quest. Every collector has a story--two stories really. One is about the discovery of a lifetime--one of 12 copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s first book of poems discovered at a New Hampshire antiques barn and bought for $15 comes immediately to mind (it later sold at auction for $198,000). The other story is a tragic tale about, say, the Shawnee Corn King cookie jar that got away.

Antiquing is one of the cheapest dates imaginable, and you don’t have to go to Temecula to do it. Antique Row in Canoga Park claims to be “the oldest and largest group of individual antique shops” in the Valley in ads that appear in the free papers stacked in stores that stock dusty old things and collectibles. Whatever its bona fides, a stroll down Antique Row takes less than an hour, and you could, as every collector knows, get lucky.

Just as an earlier quake destroyed most of the antique stories in Whittier, the 1994 Northridge temblor devastated Antique Row. Pre-quake, there were at least 19 dealers in a five-block area, centered in the 21500 block of Sherman Way, according to Patricia Needham, of Now & Then Antiques and Collectables. There have been as many as 30 shops in the area in the past, says Needham, who runs a dealers association on the row. Now 16 dealers call the area home.

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The first store to reopen after the disaster was Alan Beutler’s Old Friends. If Antique Row were a shopping mall, which blessedly it is not, Old Friends would be one of its anchors, like Bullocks or Robinsons-May. Beutler’s specialty is restored American furniture, handsome oak tables and bird’s-eye maple dressers, for instance. His back room is stuffed with chairs, church pews, buffets, desks and bookcases in various stages of resurrection.

Most of the block is unreinforced masonry brick, which tends to tumble in earthquakes. “Everything breakable broke,” recalls Beutler, but he was able to reopen in just three months. The reason? He had listened to his father when he advised: “Always save a little something for a rainy day.”

Beutler says the last two years have been his best ever. “One of the nice things the earthquake did was concentrate all the dealers in one block,” he says. Beutler, who has had his shop here for 24 years, does see the business changing, however. “Things keep getting newer.” Once, he dealt in pieces that were turn-of-the-century or older. Now pieces from the ‘20s and ‘30s are creeping in, sought by younger buyers who think of them as very, very old indeed.

Beutler recalls the days when Midwestern farmers would beg him to take vintage oak pieces off their hands. “Take all that crap you want,” they would say. “Just get it out of here.” As Beutlernotes, sounding very much the philosopher-furniture restorer, “Now it’s gold. Everything is relative.”

Needham says that business is not back to pre-quake levels but seems to be improving. “It was so devastated out here, maybe people thought we would never be back.” She thinks that the refurbishing that followed the quake upgraded the row’s appearance. “It’s kind of a spiffed-up look compared to what it was,” she says.

Asked if she was a collector before she was a dealer, she says, “Of course.” Initially, she amassed cat figurines. “Then, my mom gave me one of my grandmother’s old hat pins and that started a whole thing.” Antique eyeglasses were her next obsession. “It’s an addiction, in a way,” she says, “although hopefully it’s not detrimental to our physical health like drugs and alcohol.”

As a result of the quake, some former residents of the row have moved in together. Lynn Cherney and Margo Gutterman had a popular shop, called Treasures and Stuff, that was destroyed in the quake. Gutterman retired, and Cherney now has space in Jeanne’s Antiques, owned by Jeanne Aliso. Zulia Scotton, who shops in Arkansas (where her kinfolk are from) for the handsome quilts that are her specialty, has joined two other dealers in a shop at 21525 Sherman Way.

Shirley Ippolito is an owner of Sadie’s Corner Antiques, a store filled to overflowing with everything from automobile-shaped planters to antique clocks. The feel is country store, says Ippolito. She acknowledges that some people love it, and some don’t.

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Ippolito thinks Valleyites are spending less on antiques and collectibles because they have lost jobs or are nervous about them and because they are still recovering from the quake. Pottery, glass and other breakables are especially slow to move. “And we also don’t have it to sell,” she says. “It all broke.”

Like other dealers in the area, Ippolito wishes more people knew about the row. “Some diggers. That’s all we need,” she says, eyeing her midden of a shop. “You know, people who like to dig and look around and stuff.”

Although Antique Row has a couple of first-rate shops, it also has a few that look, as one observer says, “like garage sales.” But where else--certainly where else in Canoga Park--can you find both life-sized cardboard cutouts of the Coneheads and a rocking chair designed for nursing mothers, perhaps by Gustav Stickley?

Stan Goldman has been on the row for 25 years. For more than a year after the quake, he concentrated on his furniture restoration business. Now he has reopened his retail shop, Turn of the Century Antiques. Many of the shops on the row carry mostly “smalls,” vases, bookends and other decorative items. Not Goldman, whose shops is filled with grand constructions of gleaming wood. “Unless you like furniture,” Goldman says, “you’re going to beat a hasty retreat.”