End Times.(The Talk of the Town)(Olde Good Things' usage of salvages )

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 30-JUL-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper's empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the "architecturologist" Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse--spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he'd been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is...

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