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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 $7½ 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."