The shelves at the Conkling Salvage Exchange and Foam Center in Highlandtown once were chock-full of merchandise ranging from silk flowers and Christmas decorations to coffin handles. Now only the shelves themselves are for sale.
After 70 years in neighborhood corner store retailing, owner Stanford J. Schneider says it's time to go. The store founded in the depths of the Great Depression is a victim of the Great Recession.
"When I open at 9:30 and there are no customers before noon, it's time to close," he said the other day as he stood in the empty store. Old customers, alarmed by the sudden appearance of the vacant showroom windows, stopped by to see what was the matter.
"I can't say that I'm happy about closing. I'm not. I'll miss the people," Schneider, 80, said.
Conkling Salvage Exchange was the C-Mart of Highlandtown, buying up odd lots and out-of-season merchandise to resell at cheap prices. But the core business, the sale of foam material for boat seats, has fallen off drastically in recent months.
"Last summer was the worst we ever had," Schneider said. "People couldn't afford to put fuel in their boats."
The store at the corner of Conkling Street and Claremont Avenue was started about 1930 by Schneider's uncle, Mike Lipman, who bought inventories of bankrupt businesses and resold them at affordable prices.
"Seventy-five years later, I'm living in a time of depression, the same as he was," Schneider said.
Schneider began working in the store when he was 9 or 10, helping out on Saturdays. After graduating from City College and spending two years in the Army, he came back to the store and worked alongside his uncle until Lipman died 35 years ago. Schneider says he had planned to retire years ago and pass the store to his son, Jay. But Jay's death in 1990 crushed those plans.
Until it closed on June 27, the Conkling Salvage Exchange and Foam Center offered a little bit of everything, always on the cheap.
"It was an attraction to our neighborhood and it was always a colorful store. You were treated like a king or queen," said Pat Tirabassi Picarello, who grew up in the neighborhood and still works there. "The bargains were absolutely terrific. And if you were a neighbor, you got special treatment. Stan was a very generous man."
