Time Machine

The Mysterious Time Machine has left 14th Street--and moved south. Located for years on the second floor, behind dusty windows printed with the words MEMORABILIA and NOSTALGIA, the shop looked like it had been there forever.


the old space

The large room was packed with cardboard boxes filled with vintage magazines--movie magazines, girlie magazines--and comic books. The walls were covered with posters and magazines, faces from the past. I loved going up there and wading through the ephemera. (I love an odd second-story business, climbing the murky staircase to what feels like a secret spot above the city crowd.)

On a recent trip, I was met with a sign that said, "We moved." I looked up. The place has been cleared out, white-washed, the ceiling hung with cold track lighting. Imagine the wonderful nail salon to come!



I walked to the new address, a basement spot on 6th Avenue, next to Bigelow's drugstore. You walk down now, not up, into a much smaller room.


the new spot

I know I'm supposed be grateful that they were able to find a new space, and I am. Still, everything that makes this city interesting, if it's not vanishing completely, keeps getting crammed into ever smaller spaces, pushed to the margins, relegated to basements.

So I'm grateful, but bitter.

I liked that big room filled with those super-saturated mid-century colors, where you got a good feeling that expanded your insides, and where you could buy a magazine or a comic book and read it downstairs while enjoying a cup of coffee and cruller at the Donut Pub. 


Previously:
Time Machine
Donut Pub