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The Manhattan store boasts some 10,000 items, ranging from $10 wooden stairway spindles to the interior of an art-deco jewelry store for $135,000, complete with display cases and teller's cage. There are hundreds of marble fireplace mantels, pedestal sinks, lighting fixtures, wrought-iron gates and granite gargoyles. There are bigger chunks of history: a 5-ft.-tall, $3,500 brass-and-crystal chandelier found in a crate in Gimbel Bros.' basement, and a 9-ft.-high, 77-ft.-wide chestnut-paneled music room from a turn-of-the-century house in Southampton, N.Y. Cost: $30,000. Antique porcelain bathtubs, which can fetch $1,500 each, are the most popular items. Daniel Kasle, 34, the company's affable chief operating officer, who gave up a lucrative career as a foreign-exchange trader to indulge his passion for old sidewalk grates and theater seats, gives the stuff an uptown moniker. He calls it "high-end architecturals for adaptive reuse."
On this morning in Far Rockaway, the architecturals are still firmly attached to history. In the rubble-strewn grand hall that smells of ashes and mildew, Israel carefully pries at a piece of mahogany doorway molding. "You can't just come in and say, 'Hey, let's rip it down.' You have to get a feel for the construction," he says. "You have to ask if the craftsmen used nails, glue or screws."
This job is all nails and glue. Israel and his seven-man crew will remove all the doors and windows, complete with jambs and frames, from the spacious room, as well as the thick sheets of mahogany paneling on the walls. They use specially designed tools to do so. "Nobody makes tools to go backward in construction," says Israel. "We have to make our own pry bars and nail cutters to get behind paneling and under plumbing fixtures."
On the second floor, Brian Tyrol, 34, a youthful former cabinetmaker in horn-rimmed glasses, is digging at an oak floor in an attempt to dislodge the hardware of a pair of carved swinging doors. "I can't remember if the spring- controlled hinge would have been on the top or the bottom in 1907," he says, scratching his head. But he does know that the doors, decorated with carved vines, leaves and grapes, will bring a buck in the showroom. "In New York City, art deco was last year," he says. "Now the decorators all want Louis XV Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous sort of stuff."
A few feet away, in a bathroom large enough for championship table tennis, Steve Tillotson, a burly Vermont deconstruction expert who has been with the company since it started, and another worker pry loose a 6-ft.-long china bathtub with lion-claw feet. They flip it onto a mover's pallet and study the maker's mark on its bottom, as if they had unearthed an Egyptian artifact. "Ideal 3806," reads Tillotson with a sigh of respect. "It was made by Ideal on March 8, 1906." They trundle the fixture down a listing hallway to join half a dozen others at the top of the stairs. "You have to be careful doing this kind of work," observes Tillotson. "If you drop a 500-lb. tub on your foot, it can take the fun right out of it."