The alley rowhouses around the Conkling Salvage Exchange and Foam Center in Highlandtown are fitted with staircases so twisted and narrow that it's nearly impossible to drag a box spring and mattress to the bedrooms upstairs.
"So they've got to use foam," says store employee Adam Smith.
And so they come to the Salvage Exchange, where a big sign at the corner of Conkling Street and Claremont Avenue promises "Everything from Flypaper to Flying Machines."
Before getting to the piles of foam at the back of the store, customers navigate aisles of fake flowers -- 95 cents a bunch -- whose constant blooms wind up adorning local tombstones; plastic piggy banks fat enough for 10 times the coins it costs to take one home; spatulas and paint brushes and wooden sauce spoons; framed posters of tough guys and cowboys; socks for 69 cents a pair; and a carnival of bric-a-brac to decorate the parlor windows of East Baltimore's most whimsical grandmothers.
Years ago they sold bikes and wagons on the layaway plan, but those days are gone.
"It's always changing. Except for foam and flowers, we're not trying to sell anything forever," says Stanford Schneider, 69, whose life has been the store since he was old enough to sell three pairs of shoelaces for a nickel and mismatched socks -- better than no socks in Depression days -- for a dime.
Mixing up the inventory at a neighborhood store is the trick to moving truckloads of low-budget quirks like spatulas, Schneider confides. If folks see something on special one day, they pounce on it in the belief that it might be gone tomorrow. In this way, says Schneider, the Salvage Exchange grosses about $20,000 in sales a month, most of it from flowers and foam.
"My aunt and uncle [Sarah and Mike Lipman] started here in 1934, it used to be a bakery. They lived on the second floor where we store all the Christmas merchandise and took baths at my aunt's house on Chester Street because the store didn't have a tub," says Schneider, standing in shafts of sunshine pouring through the store's plate glass windows, remembering days when "families worked together and cried together."
"After they got married in 1918, they owned shoe stores and variety stores, ma-and-pa places. He'd open up in the morning while she cooked breakfast. When he came to the kitchen to eat, she'd mind the store."
Depression years
