BY GLORIA STRAVELLI
Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY CHRIS KELLY staff Guy Johnson, owner of the Red Bank Antique Center, says the 40-year-old antiques cooperative is the oldest of its kind in the country. Antique dealer Nan Johnson got a dozen of her friends together in 1964 and started what has turned out to be the longest-running antique co-operative in the country.
Currently celebrating its 40th year, The Red Bank Antique Center has grown to 150 dealers spread out among three vintage buildings along West Front Street at Bridge Avenue.
Nan’s son, Guy Johnson, credits his late mother for her foresight in establishing the center, which is known for the variety of dealers’ wares and competitive pricing.
Antiques and collectibles at the Red Bank Antique Center include (clockwise): sets of McDonald’s glasses; vintage costume jewelry; a circa 1896 music box. “Dealers are all in the same building and there’s built-in competition for the prices. It’s good for dealers, good for customers,” Johnson noted. “They can come in and comparison shop.”
Antique dealers and collectors from all over the world find their way to the Red Bank Antique Center, which has a total of 20,000 square feet of space and which booked about $2 million in sales last year, he said.
“It’s the oldest antique co-op in the U.S.,” said Johnson. “I have to give her all the credit. I just followed in her footsteps; just hung on to her coattails.”
Nan Johnson was a housewife with a penchant for antiques when she set out to decorate the family’s new home in Lincroft in 1957.
“She went to auctions to buy antiques, and the following week people would ask her to sell a piece for them,” recounted Johnson. “All of a sudden she was buying and selling.”
Based in the family’s garage, Johnson’s antique business was thriving. But, neighbors complained about the commercial enterprise, so she moved it to a shop on River Road in Fair Haven. When the building was sold and Johnson’s new landlord doubled the rent, she moved out.
“She had the place absolutely jam-packed; things were hanging from the ceiling,” said Guy Johnson. “Station-wagon load, after station-wagon load went back to the garage.”
Sources of the antique troves were the homes of local families who had settled here in the 1920s and ’30s.
“When they died, their kids didn’t appreciate what they had. It seems to skip a generation,” Johnson observed. “Kids growing up in the ’90s don’t want anything from the ’80s. They want the ’70s. They don’t like what their mother had, but what their grandmother had. It goes in cycles, every 15-20 years it comes back. What’s old is new.”
Johnson, who said he acquired an interest in antiques “through osmosis,” and his mother were regulars at Englishtown Auction, where Nan Johnson had become friendly with some of the antiques dealers.
“She told them, ‘Why don’t we open a group store?’ ” Johnson said. “She got 12 of her friends together to rent a building on West Front Street for what she described as a ‘permanent antique show with no admission.’
“She said she would be there every day. She told them, ‘I’ll sell your stuff; you don’t have to be there.’
“They just paid rent, and after a couple of years she worked out a way to make it work,” he said. “The co-op is the oldest in the U.S.; it may not be the first, but we’re still here.”
Johnson said that at first dealers paid rent plus a commission, but it quickly became apparent that the commission system wasn’t working.
“It didn’t work,” he said. “Everybody wanted to cheat. It wasn’t workable.”
Nan Johnson started out by leasing Building I at 217 W. Front St., which had housed the cafeteria for workers at the Eisner factory complex. The circa 1918 yellow building, known as Monmouth Antique Center, is now owned by Bruce Blaisdell.
With a long waiting list of dealers, Johnson rented Building II of the Red Bank Antique Center in 1970, right about the time Guy Johnson joined the business straight out of high school.
The building at 195 W. Front St. was built in 1955 as a shipping facility and provided much-needed warehouse space for the Johnsons’ growing wholesale antiques trade.
The Johnsons acquired the circa 1918 Building III at 226 W. Front St., a barn-like, two-story red building at the corner of Bridge Avenue, in 1975. The largest of the three buildings, it had been used for the manufacture of parachutes by the Eisner family; then was occupied by Crescent Sportswear in the 1950s and ’60s, Guy Johnson said.
Johnson, who has carried on the business since the death of his mother in 1981, subsequently bought Building II and a small building connected to it by a ramp, in 1985. He has made Building III, which houses 60 dealers, his headquarters, where he oversees the operation of the remaining two-thirds of his mother’s original antiques co-op.
Each building at the antiques center has its own character, Johnson said, more by chance than design.
“There seems to be a focus for each building,” he explained. “This building [Building III] has more of the tchotchkes; it has a lot of costume jewelry, ‘smalls.’ It’s just how everything fell together.”
Building II, with its larger booths, is where many of the furniture dealers have gravitated.
Johnson says the type of antiques and collectibles that dealers carry is more or less self-regulating, but he does make sure that no new items (he aims for 1940s and earlier), arts and crafts or offensive pieces are among the tens of thousands of items — ranging from fossils to a circa 1896 music box that once was an amusement on the Asbury Park Boardwalk — that are waiting to be rediscovered.
The center remains a true co-op, he said, where dealers pay a monthly rent of $1.85 per square foot [up from 45 cents when it opened] and share the work of manning booths and waiting on customers.
“We take turns walking the floor, helping customers and selling for fellow dealers,” he said.
“Each piece has an identifying tag that customers bring to a cashier/front-desk person who takes the payment. Each dealer has a book, and the sale is entered into the dealer’s book,” Johnson explained.
It took six or seven years for Nan Johnson’s antique co-op to really get on solid footing, Guy Johnson said.
“Mom started the nucleus of an antique district in Red Bank. She started an antique business, and it was tough in the beginning. This was the bad end of town — there were no stores — it was strictly factory buildings, no foot traffic.”
The once-thriving antiques center now faces a hard reality, confided Johnson.
“To tell the truth, it’s not as exciting as it used to be because you can’t find the stuff anymore,” Johnson complained. “I used to go out to two or three households a day and buy beautiful dining room and bedroom sets. Nothing’s left anymore; everything’s been picked over, and the prices started going up and up.”
With sources of antiques drying up, the number of antiques dealers is also declining, and Johnson said the center actually has a vacant booth for the first time.
That leaves Johnson sitting on a large swath of Red Bank real estate and he said he would be ready to call it a day if the right offer came along.
“Nobody’s approached me seriously. If somebody makes me an offer I can’t refuse, I’ll be out of here,” he said. “But I’ll just keep plugging along unless somebody does.”