Alfies Antique Market

The building you are approaching was once Jordan's Department Store, a fixture of the neighborhood that thrived for nearly a century by selling practical staples like darning wool and knicker elastic. By the mid nineteen seventies, the store had gone bankrupt, leaving behind a hollowed-out, Egyptian-style Art Deco shell on a street that had largely fallen into dereliction. Bennie Gray, a local resident and antique enthusiast, purchased the vacant building in 1976 with a vision to transform its aging rooms into a hub for trade. He named the enterprise after his father, Alfie Gray, a professional jazz drummer who had harbored a lifelong, if largely unsuccessful, passion for dealing in second-hand furniture. At the time of its opening, the building still contained an archaic copper tube cash system that would whoosh payments to a central cashier, a relic from the days when the department store was the center of local commerce.