The Mystery of Brocante - A Partial Solve!

A break in the case!

TLDR: I’m solving the mystery of a ghost store that has been frozen in time on my block for a decade. This is part three of “The Mystery of Brocante.” Start with Part One here.

It felt silly to put up a flyer. NYC isn’t a community of whimsical citizens who scan QR codes that aren’t lunch menus.

But I had a mystery to solve. And the interwebs weren’t leading me anywhere.

I was beginning to feel like a character in a quirky indie movie from the time when you could get away with a plot like “Duplass Brother cares too much about a puffy chair” or “Man goes on a quest to make NYC quieter” or “Guy gets really into train station.”

“I don’t know, dude. Maybe you should go back to focusing on the real mysteries of your life like who is going to finance your next movie and how do you define yourself as a Dad, and what is the meaning of your life,” the Parker Posey who lives in my mind said.

But silly Parker, putting up a flyer worked!

It caught the eye of the owner of a neighborhood haunt who wasn’t sure if the man who opened the store was still alive. But he called another restaurant owner to get his number. (Thanks, Tim!)

And after calming my nerves, I gave him a call. Being an armchair journalist requires asking things of strangers, which used to be a skill of mine in the before times. But I am sorely out of practice.

Not only was the proprietor game to talk, he happened to be flying in from Colorado and he was down to me at the store!

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Cosmic Soup

When you create something, there’s always a day where you move on.

And sometimes, down the road, someone re-discovers it, remixes it, or sees some other meaning in it. When that happens, it feels like a form of time travel. Like you left notes for someone on another timeline and they reached through the space-time continuum to tell you they found it.

Every year, people discover my first web series. A few times a year, I hear from parents that their kids love the Sesame Street character I haven’t voiced in a decade. Every week, The New York Times brain suggests a year old article about Caveday.

Our creations leave fossils that are added to the cosmic soup. And in an increasingly algorithmic world, there’s a better chance of someone re-encountering your contribution, which is probably the nicest thing I have to say about AI.

But this is a physical fossil. And that’s what makes it unique. NYC is just not a town that has a tolerance for that kind of economic inefficiency.

Marc Saccone moved on from this store eleven years ago.

But the fossil has remained in the dirt of 334 Atlantic Avenue for twelve years. Waiting for an indie film protagonist-archeologist-metaphor-mixer to care more than he should. And because of that anomaly, Marc now gets to be known to you.

So here’s a little piece of the mystery unraveled.

Marc is a french raconteur who came to America in the 70’s.

He opened the restaurant Chez Pascal in 1984, the same year I was born. It was the kind of restaurant that foreign dignitaries would swing by with security or Bing Crosby would choose to throw his birthday party at.

“I lived the life. I did it all. All the best times. I don’t want to be pretentious, but I did it all. I’d work from 9am to 9pm and then would go out into the night. I did that for 25 years”

Marc eventually aged out of that lifestyle. He got married and had a son. They moved to Connecticut for few years and then one day, he said to his new wife Sylvia “Let’s try out Brooklyn.” He had never been.

They moved above French Louie at 320 Atlantic Avenue and Marc began to brainstorm what would come next. He was a prolific record collector and flea market shopper and his wife’s parents were antique dealers. He had the idea to open a vintage store.

“I knew the son of the landlord at 334 Atlantic. He would always hang out on the steps. Their storefront was empty for a long time and I had him to ask his dad if they would rent it to me.”

They agreed to $1200 cash/mo. The landlord refused to give him a lease.

And with that, they opened Vintage Signage.

Note: this is why I couldn’t find anything on the internet, Brocante isn’t the name of the store. Turns out it’s just French for “Flea Market.”

“I would go to markets at 5am every Saturday and Sunday morning to buy things. Everyone knew me as the guy with the best Enamel and Subway signs”

Vintage Signage was the kind of store that brought character to a gentrifying block. “You classed up our building,” a neighbor we ran into said.

It paved the way for no less than four other vintage stores that now line Atlantic Avenue.

Marc’s son & wife at the store

“The store brought us closer. My wife loved it. It was like she went into the family business.”

Tragically, Mark’s wife fell ill and battled kidney disease for many years. She had a transplant, but it didn’t stick, and in 2012, she passed away. Marc fell two months behind on rent.

One day he left a sign up that “We’ll be back at 1pm” and he arrived back to a padlock.

He had no lease and this was a business he ran with his wife.

“I was alone. So I let it go and left New York to be with my son.”

He doesn’t know why the store is still there. But as a man who now lives in Colorado and hangs out at the lake all day, it’s a strange reminder of the wild life he lived in New York.

I asked him if there’s anything of sentimental value in there. “A Phillipe Starke Knife,” he said. “It’s very famous.”

334 Atlantic Avenue has continued to fall apart. A resident told us that there are 16 apartments inside and only four are currently inhabited. She said that they don’t return her calls and that they recently received a “Foreclosure” notice on the door. As I discovered previously, the building is for sale and being marketed as a “Substantial Rehabilitation.”

What we do know is that just after Marc’s wife died, the owner of the building, Anthony Bonilla, also passed on, leaving an estate to his three children from multiple marriages.

Maybe this fossil is literally just a fossil - the story of two families experiencing death and grief on the same timeline.

But it doesn’t explain why the store never turned over.

Maybe the building is worth more as a tax loss harvesting vehicle than an income generator. Or maybe the family has the luxury of just not caring.

They have a restaurant in the East Village which has been open for 50 years that they have chosen to not abandon. The website lists Anthony’s two daughters as the primary operators.

I have one more stop on my mystery - and it’s to go there. To see if I can hear their story.

And to see if maybe, I can get Marc his knife back.