Dealer profile.(ANTIQUES)(James Elkind)(Interview)

In 1979 a Barnard College student named Grace Gold was walking down Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side when she was struck and killed by a falling piece of a terracotta window lintel that had broken loose from the Regnor, a sixty-seven-year-old apartment house. The next year, in reaction to Gold's death, New York City passed Local Law 10 requiring an inspection of the facades of any building six stories and taller. Building owners had been quietly removing stone carvings and other decorations for years, but many used Local Law 10 to justify the wholesale "scalping" of cornices, balconies, parapets, and other architectural details.

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By 1985 an army of engineers and architects specializing in preserving and securing exterior decorations had mobilized to quell the rash of scalpings. But those five years were enough to jumpstart the peripatetic career of James Elkind.

Elkind, owner of Lost City Arts on Cooper Square in Manhattan, is widely known as an authority on mid century decorative arts and design. Recently he has positioned himself as an expert on the work of the idiosyncratic sculptor and furniture designer Harry Bertoia. In 1981 Elkind was doing business out of the basement of a town house on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, stocking architectural and industrial relics just as the city's ornamental details were coming down around him. "I went around to the big buildings, handing my card to the supers," he recalls. "I'd get a call, go up on a roof and buy up 300 feet of copper cornice." These deals led in turn to his first purchases. He convinced building managers at landmarks like the Chrysler Building and the Cities Service Building to show him storerooms full of lighting fixtures and screens.

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He was not the only one. Architectural salvage had not only become plentiful, it had become chic. By the time he had moved his store to Lafayette Street in 1985, Lost City Arts shared the budding Soho neighborhood with shops like Urban Archaeology, Secondhand Rose, and 280 Modern, all capitalizing on the vogue for cast-off bathroom fixtures and other detritus then classified as "anti-antiques."

Part of what set Elkind apart was his flair for publicity. "I had a girlfriend who worked at the New York Post who taught me that journalists were always looking for a story," he says. In 1992 he bought the topiary frames that had played a starring role in the film Edward Scissorhands, and invited ABC and CBS to cover their arrival at Lost City Arts. He bought and sold with the spirit of a collector, not just a dealer--at one point he owned sixteen of Mobil Oil's enameled red Pegasus signs--in a way that caught the imagination of editors at Metropolitan Home, the New York Times, and other influential design publications.